irbtools / Release the power of irb!

Equipped with some tools discussed at the germany.rb 2010 user group meetup, I’ve played around with my ~/.irbrc and put together a little meta gem for some useful irb tools (github)

Features

• Colorized and output as comment by wirb and fancy_irb
• Nice IRB prompt and IRB’s auto indention
• Includes stdlib’s 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
• 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
• Another way of live loading into irb: sketches
• Highlight a string with colorize('string') or a file with ray('path'), powered by coderay
• Displays ActiveRecord database 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
• And rerquiring with rrq
• Try the included Object#ri helper, powered by ori!
• Access to a lot of more commands with boson – call commands to get started

Screenshots

Setup

gem install irbtools

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 every time you start an IRB):

require 'rubygems' unless defined? Gem # 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 libraries using Irbtools.add_library and Irbtools.remove_library
Irbtools.start

RVM hint

You can add irbtools to ~/.rvm/gemsets/global and it will be installed automatically for new rubies.

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.

Update

I’ve now released irbtools-more, which installs even more useful gems, which may not build out-of-the-box.

• DrX object inspector: Object#see, requires tk
• Better auto completion, using Bond

Github