Hackety Hack is a programming starter kit. It’s an editor with helpful coding tools and built-in messaging (so you can pass scripts to friends easily.)

Hackty Hack highly depends on its upstream project shoes (which is what hacketyhack is written in). Right now shoes is undergoing a massiv rewrite with shoes4. One of the reasons for this rewrite are problems with the old shoes that sadly keep us from releasing a new version of Hackety Hack :’(

So for this reason most people concentrate their effors on shoes4. If you want to help out (which is awesome, thank you!) that might also be a good option. Shoes4 is already quite far and many elements already work but Hackty Hack doesn’t (yet). In the issues section here there also some tickets tagged with “shoes4 compatibility” you might also tackle those for a faster transition :-)

All the major pieces are in place. Hooray! There are still some kinks to work out, though. Nobody’s perfect! Please file an Issue if you find something.

H-ety H is built on Shoes. So, you gotta get Shoes first.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Hackety Hack depends on features that are only in the latest version of Shoes, “Policeman.” This is the third version of Shoes, there’s also “Rasins,” which was version 2. If you download Shoes 2, it won’t work!

Now back to your regularly scheduled instructions.

There are two options to getting Shoes: download a pre-built version, or build it yourself!

You can try downloading the latest version of Shoes from the Downloads Page on the Shoes website.

If you like living on the bleeding edge, or there isn’t a Shoes made for your platform, you can check out the Building Shoes page to find out how to build Shoes on your platform.

Once you’ve got yourself a pair of Shoes, you’ll want to fork me, then clone your repo:

$ git clone git@github.com:YOURUSER/hacketyhack.git

If you’ve got your ‘shoes’ environment variable set, you can just run Hackety directly:

$ cd hacketyhack
$ ./h-ety-h.rb

Otherwise, pick ‘h-ety-h.rb’ from the “Open an App.” menu in Shoes.

You can also run ‘shoes h-ety-h.rb’ or if you’re on a Mac, something like ’ /Users/steveklabnik/Documents/src/shoes/Shoes.app/Contents/MacOS/shoes h-ety-h.rb’ from the terminal.

If you want to build Hackety Hack as a standalone app with the installer for your platform, you need to have your own Shoes built. Then, get your directories lined up…

$ ls
shoes hacketyhack

And rebuild shoes, while pointing the APP flag at your Hackety directory:

$ cd shoes
$ rake APP=../hacketyhack
$ rake APP=../hacketyhack installer

That’s it!

Beneath my wings are many winds.

• _why, who was quite the lucky stiff. Without his work and
  vision, Hackety Hack would have never been born. Hopefully
  he’ll be proud of how his child lives out its life…

• Yukihiro Matsumoto, whose Ruby language
  is the heart of Hackety Hack. I adore
  this language. Ruby’s shared lib and stdlib
  are included under the terms of the Ruby
  license.

• Sharon Rosner for the Sequel lib
  (http://sequel.rubyforge.org)
  I use a fork from an old version.

• Jamis Buck for the Syntax lib.
  (http://syntax.rubyforge.org)
  Live syntax highlighting.

• Alex Brem for help on bloopsaphone.
  He just started hacking away. I like that!

• Numerous font authors whose free
  offerings are included.

• Fela Winkelmolen, for devoting an entire summer to get Hackety to v1.0!

• Everybody who’s been putting hard work into Shoes. You guys are awesome.