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by Christopher Cyll.
Original Post: Stupid IRB Tricks
Feed Title: Topher Cyll
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/cyll
Feed Description: I'm not too worried about it. Ruby and programming languages.
This post reflects some tricks I sent out in a mail to PDX.rb and some others I posted on my Intel internal Ruby blog. There’s nothing terribly novel here, but if you haven’t stumbled on these yet, they might save you some time.
Your .irbrc file gives you a lot of control over what your IRB looks like each time it starts. Here’s what my .irbrc file looks like:
require 'irb/completion'
ARGV.concat [ "--readline", "--prompt-mode", "simple" ]
class Object
def mymethods
(self.methods - self.class.superclass.instance_methods).sort
end
end
The first two lines turn on tab completion. If you don’t have this on
already, turn it on now! It only works when IRB can figure out the
type of expressions, but it helps make the interpreter more
friendly. Type []. and hit tab to see the array methods tab
complete.
The second chunk sets up an useful introspection function that Ben and
I came up with. It allows me to type foo.mymethods and get only the
methods that are defined for foo, but not the methods defined in its
superclass, which I find is often what I want (and sorted!). This is
important because sometimes Ruby’s humane interface means the number
of methods can be a little overwhelming.
Oh, and one other tip! If you’re doing interactive shell scripting in
irb, you’ll often get into situations where the huge list of files
you’re copying, or text-replacing or whatever is printing after every
command since most Ruby commands return values. Waiting for hundreds
of lines to print after each command can start to drive you nuts.
Thankfully, you can shut off this echoing behavior in irb by typing:
conf.echo = nil
Those are all the tricks I can think of, but there must be more out
there…
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