Irbtools

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Improvements for Ruby's IRB console, like syntax highlighted output and a lot of debugging and introspection methods. Unlike with PRY, you are still in your normal IRB. It is designed to work out-of-the-box, so there is no reason to not use it!

Setup

$ gem install irbtools

IRB executes code in ~/.irbrc on start-up. If the file does not exist, yet, just create a new one. Add the following content:

require 'irbtools'

You also need to add irbtools to your project's Gemfile:

gem 'irbtools', require: 'irbtools/binding'

Then start IRB (with Irbtools loaded) from the terminal or directly from your code with:

binding.irb

Enable More Gems

Some suggested gems will not be installed to ensure wider general support. For the full feature set, you can install irbtools-more. To do so, change your .irbrc to:

require 'irbtools/more'

and edit your Gemfile to read like this:

gem 'irbtools-more', require: 'irbtools/binding'

Features

Irbtools' IRB Improvements

• Syntax highlighting (wirb / fancy_irb)
• Loads included third party libraries effeciently
• Customizable views for specfic options using hirb
  • ActiveRecord results get displayed as a table
• (irbtools-more) Improved tab-completion

Irbtools' Included Methods for IRB

Highlights

• Lookup and manipulate instance variables / methods with ease using object_shadow
• (irbtools-more) Go even further with looksee, the best lookup path inspection tool out there
• Display a method's source code using code
• Inline access to ri docs by ori
  • If you have deactivated ri, you can re-generate the docs with something like: rvm docs generate-ri
• Find methods that turn one value into another value with methodfinder
• Use VIM from inside IRB

Ruby Introspection

Platform Info

General Utils

IRB Support

Files and Navigation

Advanced Tweaking

See CONFIGURE.md.

Troubleshooting: ANSI colors on Windows

Windows: ANSI support can be enabled via ansicon or ConEmu or WSL.

Troubleshooting: Clipboard not working on Linux

Clipboard support requires xsel or xclip. On ubuntu, do:

sudo apt-get install xsel

Hint: Debundle

If you do not want to add Irbtools to your project's Gemfile, you will need a debundle hack. Put it at the beginning of your ~/.irbrc file and you are fine.

Hint: No ANSI / IRB extension

You can use Irbtools without colors/IRB extensions. To do so, put this into ~/.irbrc:

require 'irbtools/non_fancy'
Irbtools.start

Hint: Web Console and Other Approaches

Irbtools works well together with the amazing web-console!, and also with the ripl IRB alternative.

J-_-L

Copyright (c) 2010-2020 Jan Lelis https://janlelis.com released under the MIT license.