Plumage: A RubyMotion CLI App

I wanted to play with terminal.sexy¹ recently to see if I wanted a different terminal colour scheme—but as I use Terminal.app, I needed to convert the colour scheme to the iTerm 2 format for import.

I found plumage.rb by Wilson Lee, which converts between Terminal.app colours to iTerm 2 colours. It requires MacRuby², which does not run on Mac OS X 10.9. I started working on a translation to pure Ruby, but hit a roadblock because Terminal.app stores much of its data as archived NSData objects, requiring NSKeyedUnarchiver and NSKeyedArchiver—which I didn’t have support for in a pure Ruby implementation.

This was a perfect excuse to use by RubyMotion licence, so I restarted my porting effort to RubyMotion. I’m using motion-osx-cli to build a command-line tool with RubyMotion. I had to implement my own command-line option parser (importing Ruby’s optparse.rb mostly worked, but it didn’t handle extra arguments correctly, and caused too much noise on incorrect arguments).

There is one point I haven’t figured out how to make work, and that’s how to properly codesign a command-line utility with RubyMotion (it will probably require changes to RubyMotion itself).

You can find this code at halostatue/plumage.