What alternatives to IRB are there?
I've never heard of a (popular) alternative to IRB, but there certainly are several useful gems that make the IRB experience a lot nicer:
- awesome_print pretty prints Ruby objects with indentation and coloring, very useful when trying to look at nested hashes or other complicated data structures.
- looksee is pretty awesome too, it provides a method
lp
(lookup path) that shows you where a Ruby object gets its methods from (class, superclass etc). - Sketches connects your editor and IRB, so it's especially useful if you are the type who likes interactive development. Emacs with
inf-ruby
is also good for this. - Wirble is a whole set of IRB enhancements, like tab completion and syntax highlighting. There's also Utility Belt, but I don't personally use that, so can't comment on its features.
Edit
I forgot Hirb, which is very useful for e.g. showing the results of an ActiveRecord query in a Rails console.
Use Pry: https://github.com/pry/pry
Let's you:
- start sessions at runtime
- view method source code
- view method documentation (not using RI so you dont have to pre-generate it)
- pop in and out of different contexts
- syntax highlighting
- gist integration
- view and replay history
- open editors to edit method using
edit-method obj.my_method
syntax
A tonne more great and original features
What a coincidence. Rubyflow just yesterday announced the irbtools gem, which is a meta-gem containing lots of cool irb enhancement gems. It contains:
- Colorized and output as comment by
wirb
andfancy_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_printq
– likep
, but on one lineObject#m
– ordered method list (takes integer parameter: level of nesting)Object#d
– puts the object, returns self (usingtap
)
- “Magical” information constants:
Info, OS, RubyVersion, RubyEngine
OS.windows?
RubyEngine.jruby?
RubyVersion.is.at_least? 1.9
- Clipboard features:
copy
andpaste
- also available:
copy_input
andcopy_output
for session history
- also available:
- Call
vim
(or another supported editor) to edit a file, close it and it gets loaded into your current irb session, powered byinteractive_editor
- Another way of live loading into irb: sketches
- Highlight a string with
olorize('string')
or a file withray('path')
, powered by coderay - Displays ActiveRecord database entries as tables with
hirb
- Restart
irb
withreset!
or change the Ruby version with theuse
method andrvm!
- 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 byori
! - Access to a lot of more commands with
boson
– call commands to get started
There are nice screenshots on the irbtools page. One nice thing about it is that each of the utilities can stand on its own, in case you just want to cherry-pick one or two features.
2013 Update
Since I wrote this, Pry has become a popular IRB replacement. It doesn't do as much as irbtools
out of the box, but it extensible with plugin gems that add cool features. You can browse source code like it was a unix directory:
pry(main)> cd FileUtils
pry(FileUtils):1> show-method rm
From: /opt/ruby/lib/ruby/1.9.1/fileutils.rb @ line 556:
Number of lines: 10
Owner: FileUtils
def rm(list, options = {})
fu_check_options options, OPT_TABLE['rm']
list = fu_list(list)
fu_output_message "rm#{options[:force] ? ' -f' : ''} #{list.join ' '}" if options[:verbose]
return if options[:noop]
list.each do |path|
remove_file path, options[:force]
end
end
pry(FileUtils):2>
You can also browse Ruby documentation, issue shell commands, and if you're a Rails user, you can use the pry-rails
gem to get pry in your Rails console. There's also a way to hook it into Sinatra and use it with Heroku.
There's ample documentation--there are a bunch of screencasts including a Railscast. It's definitely worth looking into.