I’ve been doing a lot of development in MacVim of late, but there are times when I long for the warm embrace of an IDE. For many reasons that I won’t detail here, I find RubyMine to be the best Ruby IDE out there. While its keyboard-based file navigation is functional, I much prefer the interface provided by PeepOpen that I had grown acustomed to when using MacVim and TextMate.

Fortunately, with a little work we can use the External Tools configuration in RubyMine to invoke PeepOpen.

1. With RubyMine closed, navigate to your /Applications folder and rename the RubyMine app bundle (i.e. RubyMine 3.2.3) to RubyMine. I tried numerous escape sequences when configuring the external tool to avoid this, but none of them worked.
2. Launch RubyMine, open preferences, and navigate to the “External Tools” section under IDE Settings. Add a new external tool. Name it, group it, and describe it however you wish. Make sure you turn off the console option. Set the program to open and the parameters to peepopen://$ProjectFileDir$?editor=RubyMine. My configuration looks like this. Apply these changes to save the new command.
3. Go to the KeyMap settings in RubyMine and search for the command you just created. Add a keyboard shortcut of your choosing. I used command-t, just as I had in MacVim and TextMate.
4. Be sure to apply all changes before exiting the preferences. Load up a project and give it a shot!

Notes

• The editor= line in the parameter tells PeepOpen which application it should send the file to. The space in the RubyMine app bundle name was causing this to fail. I tried numerous ways of escaping this before giving up and renaming the bundle. I’ve always been annoyed by it, anyway.
• I had some issues with the $ProjectFileDir$ macro in my project. $Projectpath$ and $SourcePath$ were also incorrectly mapped. I fixed this by adding/removing some random items under the Project Structure settings, but it’s not clear why this was necessary.
• You probably want to open your PeepOpen preferences and set it to exclude the .idea directory by adding that path to “Directories to Ignore”.