This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Jan Lelis. Original Post: irbtools / Release the power of irb! Feed Title: rbJ*_*L.net Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/rbJL Feed Description: Hi, I am a fan of Ruby and like to explore it and the world around ;). So I started this blog, where I am publishing code snippets, tutorials for beginners as well as general thoughts about Ruby, the web or programming in general. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Jan Lelis Latest Posts From rbJ*_*L.net

Equipped with some tools discussed at the germany.rb user group meetup, I’ve played around with my ~/.irbrc and put together a little meta gem for some useful irb tools.

Features

• Colorized by wirble and put out as comment by irb_rocket
• Nice IRB prompt and IRB’s auto indention (still simple, but still far better than none)
• FileUtils: ls, cd, pwd, ln_s, rm, mkdir, touch, cat
• Many debugging helpers: ap, q, o, c, y, Object#m, Object#d
  • ap – awesome_print
  • q – like p, but on one line
  • Object#m – ordered method list (takes integer parameter: level of nesting)
  • Objedt#d – puts the object, returns self (using tap)
• “Magical” information constants: Info, OS, RubyVersion, RubyEngine
  • OS.windows?
  • RubyEngine.jruby?
  • RubyVersion.is.at_least? 1.9
• guessmethod automatically corrects typing mistakes or suggests alternative methods (method_missing hook)
• Clipboard features: copy and paste
  • also available: copy_input and copy_output for session history
• Call vim (or another supported editor) to edit a file, close it and it gets loaded into your current irb session, powered by interactive_editor
• Highlight a string with colorize('string') or a file with ray('path'), powered by coderay
• Displays ActiveRecord databse entries as tables with hirb
• Restart irb with reset! or change the Ruby version with the use method and rvm!
• Includes the current directory in the load path (was removed in 1.9.2 for security reasons, but is pretty annoying in irb)
• Shorter requiring like this: rq:mathn
• (DrX object inspector: Object#see, requires tk – did not include it in the gem, because it fails to build correctly on lots of system)

Screenshots

Setup

gem install irbtools
gem install irb_rocket --source http://merbi.st

On Linux, you also need to sudo apt-get install xclip

On MacOS, you can install growl to use the g gem.

Usage

To use it, put the following in your ~/.irbrc file (this file is loaded everytime you start an irb):

require 'rubygems' # only needed in 1.8
require 'irbtools'

If it does not exists, just create a new one.

It’s is possible to modify, which libraries get loaded:

# no require 'irbtools'
require 'irbtools/configure'
# edit the Irbtools.libs array 
Irbtools.init

You could also just read and copy the irbtools/configure.rb and irbtools.rb source files, tweak them and use them directly as .irbrc ;)

By the way

Sometimes, you need a clean IRB without all the .irbrc libraries. In such a case, just start irb with the -f option and it will suppress loading the .irbrc.

Github