Guard has been my tool of choice for continuous testing for quite some time now, and I can not recommend it enough. One of my only complaints with the workflow is that Guard can be too aggressive and run all the specs in the relevant files which creates overwhelming amount of feedback, when I actually just want to focus on a few specific tests.

Rspec supports tagging specs as an elegant way to temporarily restrict your spec runner to only run a specific set of tests. This works out of the box with the Guard RSpec runner, but it can be cumbersome to constantly add and remove focus: true statements for each of your specs…until now!

For the past six months, Sublime Text has been my primary IDE, and I’ve released my first Sublime Text plugin, the Sublime SpecFocuser plugin, to help streamline your workflow of focusing on Rspec tests.

The SpecFocuser plugin adds a convenient command that will automatically tag your currently selected spec with the proper focus: true statement. The plugin is also smart enough to traverse up your current scope as well to find the nearest it, context or describe block. And the best part is that once you’ve wrapped up your testing, re-running the plugin command will strip out the focus: true statement and get you back to a clean, un-focused test suite!

This is my first foray into the world of Sublime Text plugin development, and although I’m not a huge fan of Python, I’m impressed with the flexibility of the Sublime Text plugin system. That’s quite a statement given that after two solid years of working with VIM, I still cringe at the idea of delving into Vimscript!

I see a lot more hacking on Sublime Text plugins in my future to further optimize my development workflow…