drawrect

drawrect is a simple command line OS X app that draws rectangles on the screen.

It was originally designed to aid debugging Shortcat by visualising CGRects or NSRects from within lldb.

It also serves as an example on how to build a command line app with RubyMotion.

Screenshot

Usage

drawrect was designed to be used from within lldb

• dr object.bounds - draws a rect at object.bounds using bottom-left origin
• drf object.bounds - draws a rect at object.bounds using top-left origin
• drc - clears all rects

You can use it from the command line as well.

Usage:
drawrect rect <rect> [label] [colour] [opacity] - draws a rect with bottom left origin
drawrect flipped_rect <rect> [label] [colour] [opacity] - draws a rect with top left origin
drawrect clear - clears all rects
drawrect quit - quits server

Installation

• Download the binary or build it yourself
  • curl -L https://github.com/chendo/drawrect/releases/download/v1.0/drawrect > /usr/local/bin/drawrect && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/drawrect
• Optional: Grab lldb script:
  • mkdir -p ~/Library/lldb; curl -L https://github.com/chendo/drawrect/raw/master/drawrect.py > ~/Library/lldb/drawrect.py
  • echo "command script import ~/Library/lldb/drawrect.py" >> ~/.lldbinit

Notes

• Only tested on 10.8
• The backgrounded drawrect server will exit after an hour of inactivity.
• The rects will stay on the screen after lldb quits. I couldn’t seem to find hooks for process termination or resuming execution.

Building from source

drawrect is written in RubyMotion, so you’ll need that to compile it.

$ rake build:development  # binary will get built at `build/MacOSX*/drawrect.app/MacOS/drawrect`

License

See LICENSE for details.