Vim and Rspec: run the test under the cursor

Lately I have been working more than usual with Rspec and Capybara, the de facto testing libraries for Rails (yes, yes, I know, there are others).

I was adding some integration tests to the website today when I suddenly realized that it is a waste of time to wait for the full test suite to run when you only care about a single test result. As I am adding tests to an existing codebase, most of the time I just want to run the test that I am currently writing to see if it passes or not.

Turns out that Rspec has a lot of options I didn’t know about, including one to specify the line of the file that you want to test. For example, to run the test in line 25 of the file spec/example_spec.rb, just call Rspec in the following way

rspec spec/example_spec.rb:25

You don’t have to point rspec the exact line in where the test starts, it is clever enough to find the enclosing test definition given a line

So now that we know how to run a certain test, we just need to be able to do so dynamically from within vim, depending on the cursor position. We can accomplish that with some Vimscript, Vim’s own script language.

This has been the first time I have a look at the language, so maybe there is a better/more efficient way to do it, but this works for me. Add the following snippet to your .vimrc file.

function! RSpecFile()
  execute("!clear && rspec " . expand("%p"))
endfunction
map <leader>R :call RSpecFile() <CR>
command! RSpecFile call RSpecFile()

function! RSpecCurrent()
  execute("!clear && rspec " . expand("%p") . ":" . line("."))
endfunction
map <leader>r :call RSpecCurrent() <CR>
command! RSpecCurrent call RSpecCurrent()

With this in your config file, use <leader>r to run the test under your cursor and <leader>R to run all the tests in the current file.

The code is pretty straightforward: basically we execute a shell command using some vimscript functions to get the variables we want with expand("%p") (the file) and line(".") (the line number).