[vidarh]

My desktop is almost all Ruby. Ruby is not going away for decades.

I've just started replacing my shell with a shell in Ruby too. To me one of the nice things about Ruby is that I feel like I can get things done so easily it doesn't matter if the community is smaller. Almost all the code I use apart from the kernel, Chrome and Xorg is now my own.

[lambdaba]

Do tell us more on how you use Ruby everywhere? I use Ruby exclusively for scripts (I love built-in inline deps with bundler/inline).

[vidarh]

My X11 window manager is pure Ruby: https://github.com/vidarh/rubywm That was posted to HN a while back. It's a minimalist tiling wm.

My file manager is (very simplistic, I do most of my actual file management from the shell - it's in effect mostly a desktop launcher) Ruby

It, as well as my desktop switcher (also Ruby) depends on pure Ruby X11 bindings, and a pure Ruby TrueType font renderer:

  https://github.com/vidarh/skrift
  https://github.com/vidarh/skrift-x11
  https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11

So does my Ruby terminal (what's on Github is nothing like the full version, which I will package up and push one of these days).

My editor is also pure Ruby, using Rouge (Ruby; not mine) for syntax highlighting. That also needs a major update on Github - what's there probably won't even run for others because my personal "ecosystem" on my system is full of helpers and these things are written to be as minimalist as possible so e.g. my editors "file open" dialog is a 2-3 line wrapper around dmenu.

And I've just replaced my shell with Ruby - but that's just for interactive use, so it's very tiny.

[lambdaba]

Very cool, thanks. I'd switch to a Ruby WM in a heartbeat if it worked on Wayland.

[vidarh]

Unfortunately, that's a vastly larger job than an X11 wm because you're either implementing a full display server or need to create bindings to something like Wlroots - under X the wm is close to just another client of the X server.