If Batman was a Ruby hacker he would definitely use this: http://utilitybelt.rubyforge.org/index.html. This is a great collection of some great IRB enhancements. Among others, like UNIX style history and a grep for method names and classes (which I really need a lot) I find this to be the most productive one, at least for me: Edit IRB content in TextMate (or any other editor) and save it back to IRB!
This is really great!
After you closed your editor window and are back to your IRB session and have something more to add you just go back and have all the previous code still there.
For me who works a lot with IRB for prototyping and testing purpose this comes in really handy. It is much easier to work with code that span multiple lines due to this helper script.
Thanks to Giles Bowkett and the other contributers of this fine collection.
See ya!
PS: I put up a little screen cast for demonstration. Enjoy!
Utility Belt Gem Screencast from Dirk Breuer on Vimeo.
That's nice! I work a lot in irb, too. I hope there's something similar for emacs :) I don't understand the method grepping part, though. I usually do obj.methods.grep /foo/ - but this works out of the box in Ruby, so what advantage do you get with utilitybelt?
the screencast is a great idea!
would you give the world a peep on your irbrc? :-)
@DerGuteMoritz: There is builtin support for emacs, just type 'emacs'. And the grepping part, I must admit I wasn't really aware of doing it your way ;-) So I think just forget about that point. The main point for me is really the editor feature.
@basti: It isn't really that amazing, but here you go - http://pastie.textmate.org/237336.