Every programmer needs a rubberduck. COM add-in for the VBA & VB6 IDE (VBE).
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License (GPLv3)
Copyright © 2014-2023 Rubberduck project contributors.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
What is Rubberduck?
The Visual Basic Editor (VBE) has stood still for over 20 years, and there is no chance a first-party update to the legacy IDE ever brings it up to speed with modern-day tooling. Rubberduck aims to bring the VBE into this century by doing exactly that.
Read more about contributing here:
The add-in has many features - below is a quick overview. See https://rubberduckvba.com/features for more details.
Enhanced Navigation
The Rubberduck command bar displays docstring for the current member.
The Code Explorer drills down to member level, has a search bar, and lets you visualize your project as a virtual folder hierarchy organized just the way you need it.
All references to any identifier, whether defined in your project or any of its library references, are one click away. If it has a name, it can be navigated to.
Static Code Analysis, Refactorings
Rubberduck analyses your code in various configurable ways and can help avoid beginner mistakes, keep a consistent programming style, and find all sorts of potential bugs and problems. Many code inspections were implemented due to frequently-asked VBA questions on Stack Overflow, and on many occasions, an automatic quick-fix is available.
Rename variables to meaningful identifiers without worrying about breaking something. Promote local variables to parameters, extract interfaces and methods from a selection, encapsulate fields into properties, reorder and/or delete parameters, and automatically update all callers.
Unit Testing
Write code that provably works, by invoking it from small test procedures that setup the conditions for a test case and assert that the expected outcome happened. Rubberduck provides a rich MSTest-inspired API, and soon an experimental mocking framework (a COM-visible wrapper around Moq) that can automatically implement VBA interfaces and configure mock objects.
Smart Indenter
A port of the popular 32-bit add-in by Office Automation Ltd., whose legacy VB6 source code was generously made freely available for Rubberduck under GPLv3 by the legendary Stephen Bullen and Rob Bovey themselves! Rubberduck will prompt to import your Smart Indenter settings on first load if detected.
Annotations
Special comments that become a game changer with Rubberduck processing them: organize modules in your project using @Folder annotations, synchronize VB_Description and VB_PredeclaredId hidden attributes without manually exporting, editing, and re-importing modules with @Description and @PredeclaredId annotations.
More?
Of course there's more! There's tooling to help synchronizing the project with files in a folder (useful for source/version control!), some auto-completion features like self-closing parentheses and quotes; there's a regular expression assistant, a replacement for the VBE's add/remove references dialog, and so many other things to discover, and yet even more to implement.
Tips
Rubberduck isn't a lightweight add-in and consumes a large amount of memory. So much, that working with a very large project could be problematic with a 32-bit host, and sometimes even with a 64-bit host. Here are a few tips to get the best out of your ducky.
- Start small: explore the features with a small test project first.
- Refresh often: refresh Rubberduck's parser every time you pause to read after modifying a module. The fewer files modified since the last parse, the faster the next parse.
- Review inspection settings: there are many inspections, and some of them may produce a lot of results if they're directly targeting something that's part of your coding style. Spawning tens of thousands of inspection results can significantly degrade performance.
- Avoid late binding: Rubberduck cannot resolve identifier references and thus cannot understand the code as well if even the VBA compiler is deferring all validations to run-time. Declare and return explicit data types, and cast from
ObjectandVariantto a more specific type whenever possible.
Join us on our Discord server for support, questions, contributions, or just to come and say hi!
For more information please see Getting Started in the project's wiki, and follow the project's blog for project updates and advanced VBA OOP reading material.
Roadmap
After over two years without an "official" new release, Rubberduck version jumped from 2.5.2 to 2.5.9, adding minor but interesting features to an already impressive array.
The road ahead
Rubberduck 2.x is now planned to end at 2.5.9.x, perhaps with a number of small revisions and bug fixes, but nothing major should be expected, as the developers' attention is shifting to the 3.0 project:
- Parsing and understanding VBA code is moving to a language (LSP) server
- We're making a new editor inside (for now) the Visual Basic Editor that will be the LSP client
- Baseline server-side feature set for 3.0 is everything 2.5.9 does
- Baseline client-side feature set for 3.0 is the 2.5.x UI (perhaps tweaked a bit/lot) hosted in the Rubberduck Editor
Fully controlling the editor opens Rubberduck to everything we ever dreamed of:
- In-editor syntax and static code analysis reporting and quick-fixing
- Full editor theming, custom syntax highlighting
See the Rubberduck3 repository for more information.