Idea behind this is a working environment that spends more time in the editor, rather than switching to the terminal ...

Autotest

Autotest (which is part of ZenTest) is something you run on your Rails project. What it does is detect saved changes and automatically runs test.

Growl

Growl is a universal notifier for OSX. What it does is pop up messages in temporary windows to tell you about things.

RSpec

Is the testing framework I am using - blogged about in other articles

Installing Growl

Growl has a clever .dmg which makes installation easy. However we also need to install growlnotify. A script to do was located in /Volumes/Growl\ 1.1.2/Extras/ when the .dmg was opened. When successful running in terminal which growlnotify will return something e.g. /usr/local/bin/growlnotify

Configuring Autotest

Had to trawl a few different sources to find code to do this on my system. Basically put following code in ~/.autotest and then restarted autotest. Also down loaded images and put them in the path shown in the code.

module Autotest::Growl

  def self.growl title, msg, img, pri=0, sticky=""
    system "growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{sticky}"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    results = [at.results].flatten.join("\n")
    output = results.slice(/(\d+)\s+examples?,\s*(\d+)\s+failures?(,\s*(\d+)\s+pending)?/)
    if output
      if $~[2].to_i > 0
        growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "~/.autotest_images/rails_fail.png", 2
      else
        growl "Test Results", "#{output}", "~/.autotest_images/rails_ok.png"
      end
    end
  end
end

If this doesn't work debug the code by examining output e.g. put puts output before the if output line.