Comments on: irb tab completion

By: Ronald

Ronald — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:01:55 +0000

There’s quite a few more good editing tips for irb to be found at http://www.tortoiseandachilles.com/2007/09/improve-your-interactive-programming.html It’s amazing how much more useful irb is once you turn it into a decent editing environment. I use it constantly now, and Rails’ console as well.

By: Johan Tam

Johan Tam — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:47:14 +0000

Thanks for your solution.

By: Bill Nace

Bill Nace — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:35:12 +0000

On OS X, with the default ruby install, this doesn’t work. There is no “irb/completion” file for the require to find. Anyone got a work-around?

By: Sergei Matusevich

Sergei Matusevich — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:42:53 +0000

Where is the ~/.irbrc file on Windows?

I guess irb just uses HOME environment variable to locate the .irbrc file, so you have to set up this variable if you don’t have it already, start the new cmd session and try it out.

By: eliben

eliben — Wed, 09 May 2007 04:11:21 +0000

Where is the ~/.irbrc file on Windows ? (this is the system this post talks about)

By: Sergei Matusevych

Sergei Matusevych — Wed, 09 May 2007 01:12:08 +0000

Hey, why not just add the line require 'irb/completion' to your ~/.irbrc file?

By: Richard Heycock

Richard Heycock — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:23:54 +0000

Good call. I’ve always found the list of methods on an object by using .methods. But no more! And this does more than just print the methods. Life’s Good.

Martin that does work on Linux. I tend to use bash functions but both work.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:17:42 +0000

This and a few other IRB enhancements are bundled up in a Gem called wirble: http://pablotron.org/software/wirble/

By: Martijn Engler

Martijn Engler — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:05:02 +0000

Thanks for the tip!
To do this on my Mac I used:
$ vi .profile
add the following line to the end (shift+G, i for the non-vim-ers ;-)):
alias irb=’irb -r irb/completion’
save & exit (:x)
$ . .profile
$ irb

We’ve got working tab completion! Didn’t test this on my Linux/FreeBSD-box yet, but it should be about the same.