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FastRI is a much improved ri (the standard tool for browsing core/stdlib/third party Ruby documentation):

• a lot faster --- don't you hate hearing your HD moan for several seconds with plain old ri?
• better support for RI documentation in RubyGems packages
• more intelligent: configurable search strategies (case-independent, "nested exact", partial matches, etc)
• DRb-enabled: serve RI documentation to other machines in your LAN (uses a Rinda Ring to autodiscover services)

FastRI is faster than ri (read here to see what makes it so fast), and as of 0.1.1 it's also much smarter, as it's got a configurable search strategy that includes "nested exact", partial, "nested partial", as well as case-insensitive modes.

Downloading

You can get FastRI here or install it via RubyGems

 gem install fastri

Comparing to ri

RubyGems support

Compare this:

$ ri -T ActiveRecord::Base#toggle
 More than one method matched your request. You can refine
 your search by asking for information on one of:
  
      ActiveRecord::Base#toggle, ActiveRecord::Base#toggle!,
      ActiveRecord::Base#toggle, ActiveRecord::Base#toggle!,
      ActiveRecord::Base#toggle, ActiveRecord::Base#toggle!,
      [...]

to this:

$ fri Base#toggle
---------------------------------------------- ActiveRecord::Base#toggle
     toggle(attribute)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Turns an attribute that's currently true into false and vice 
     versa. Returns self.

Speed

fri is much faster than ri; here are some times measured with a cold cache:

$ time fri -f plain Array#fetch
------------------------------------------------------------ Array#fetch
     array.fetch(index)                    -> obj                       
[...]
real    0m0.287s  (real    0m0.127s with a hot cache)
user    0m0.048s
sys     0m0.008s

Compare to:

$ time ri -T -f plain Array#fetch
------------------------------------------------------------ Array#fetch
[...]
real    0m10.136s (real    ~ 1.5s with a hot cache)
user    0m1.140s
sys     0m0.464s

Search strategies

"Nested exact"

This illustrates FastRI's ability to locate classes deep in the class hierarchy: