Due to Mondrian's consistent design, it is easy to learn and use to anyone familiar with other popular editors such as Visual Studio, so you can concentrate on debugging your program instead of wrestling with the interface. As you type, the object browser updates with a tree heirarchy of your source code's modules, classes and methods. The list is sorted automatically, and when editing a project, can be sorted to show either a list of project files or a single tree of all objects in the project.

This screenshot shows two open projects. Click to enlarge.

When editing a project, you can select a "main" file to execute automatically anytime you run the project with the F5 key. That way, you don't have to hunt the main file down every time you execute the program. Of course, most functions with Mondrian are available on an object-by-object basis using right-click context menus, so you can always run an individual file with ease. Mondrian runs your file in a separate process with its own input and output streams, but captures the standard error to report debugging statements and runtime errors. This allows you to execute a text-mode script in the exact same environment as it will run in the operating system. In the event of an unhandled exception, Mondrian automatically jumps to the line and file reported in the error code.

Mondrian jumps to the correct file and error line. The source browser is set to file view in this shot. Click to enlarge.

The innovative project desktop shows you a graphical overview of your files and their objects, and acts as a centralized place to manage your project. You can create new files, import existing files and even rename project files right from the IDE. In future versions, the project desktop will act as a place to store notes and possibly UML-style charts about your project.

The source code editor is based on the familiar SciTE framework, but syntax highlighting and auto-indentation are handled by Mondrian internally. Therefore, the editor can be tailored to Ruby's specific needs and supports advanced features such as regular expression recognition and variable-delimited string literals. All the familiar editing shortcuts are here, such as search and replace, undo/redo and goto line.

The handy project desktop. Click to enlarge.

As you might expect with so many features updating as you type, it's a lot to handle for a scripting language like Ruby, which is inherently slower than a compiled language like C++. Very large files can take some time to load, but a great deal of care has been taken to make editing as lag-free as possible, and the IDE is as responsive as a compiled program in most cases. The payoff is that Mondrian runs identically on Windows, Linux, or any platform that supports Ruby and the FOX GUI toolkit.

Convinced? You can download Mondrian here. If you still have questions, check out the forums or please feel free to email us directly.