How can I run Ruby specs and/or tests in MacVim without locking up MacVim?

About 6 months ago I switched from TextMate to MacVim for all of my development work, which primarily consists of coding in Ruby, Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.

With TextMate, whenever I needed to run a spec or a test, I could just command+R on the test or spec file and another window would open and the results would be displayed with the 'pretty' format applied. If the spec or test was a lengthy one, I could just continue working with the codebase since the test/spec was running in a separate process开发者_C百科/window. After the test ran, I could click through the results directly to the corresponding line in the spec file.

Tim Pope's excellent rails.vim plugin comes very close to emulating this behavior within the MacVim environment. Running :Rake when the current buffer is a test or spec runs the file then splits the buffer to display the results. You can navigate through the results and key through to the corresponding spot in the file.

The problem with the rails.vim approach is that it locks up the MacVim window while the test runs. This can be an issue with big apps that might have a lot of setup/teardown built into the tests. Also, the visual red/green html results that TextMate displays (via --format pretty, I'm assuming) is a bit easier to scan than the split window.

This guy came close about 18 mos ago: http://cassiomarques.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/running-rspec-files-from-vim-showing-the-results-in-firefox/ The script he has worked with a bit of hacking, but the tests still ran within MacVim and locked up the current window.

Any ideas on how to fully replicate the TextMate behavior described above in MacVim?

Thanks!

There is a plugin called vim-addon-background-cmd that can allow you to run tasks in the background instead of locking up the vim interface. You would have to create the call to run through the background command. See the docs for more information on how to do that.

A few months back I was looking for this same exact thing. Then I discovered autotest with rspec. Now I keep a separate terminal window open which shows my last run tests. If I change any relavent code files my tests are automatically run for me (the files are watched and if they change the tests run).

If you want the same autotest type behavior in a non-rails project you can look at the watchr gem. It's functionality is similar to autotest but you can use it in ANY framework.