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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T04:38:42+00:00

I’d like to live prototype GUIs with Macruby. Like creating a window, placing some

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I’d like to live prototype GUIs with Macruby. Like creating a window, placing some views in it, etc.. Is that possible?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Yes! I just figured this out myself, so I thought I’d share (even though this is an old question). I’m assuming you have MacRuby installed (I’m using 0.11).

    Install HotConsole. HotConsole is an IRB-like thing that runs MacRuby code. The nice thing is that it is multithreaded, which means the HotCocoa app doesn’t block the console. To install just:

    % git clone git@github.com:altirah/hotconsole.git hotconsole
% cd hotconsole
% macrake

    You can then drag the HotConsole.app to your /Applications folder.

    In HotConsole, you can store a HotCocoa window in a variable and then play around with it. For example, in HotConsole.app (make sure you use alt-Enter to go to a new line, else you will run what you’ve typed so far):

    win = window frame: [100, 100, 500, 500], title: 'Hello' do |w|
  w << label(text: 'Hello', layout: {start: false})
end

    You should see a nice Cocoa window pop up with a label that says ‘Hello’. Now for the fun part. In HotConsole.app, you can now type:

    win << button                              
win << web_view( :layout => {:expand => [:width, :height]},
                               :url => "http://macruby.org")

    HotConsole is pretty crashy for me, but I’m using a not-yet-released version of MacRuby to build/run it, so I don’t know if that makes a difference.

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