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Wirble: Tab-Completion and Syntax Coloring for irb

Post by Peter Cooper

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Wirble
If you haven't got tab-completion and syntax coloring in your irb, you owe it to yourself to follow these instructions right away (should work for Linux, OS X, and Cygwin users). First, install the Wirble gem:

sudo gem install -y wirble

Next, create or edit a file called .irbrc in your home folder (~/.irbrc), and make sure these lines are included there:

require 'rubygems'
require 'wirble'
Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize

Now play with irb and see joy similar to that in the screenshot above. Try tab-completion too. It's great!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Cool, Ruby Tricks. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Wirble: Tab-Completion and Syntax Coloring for irb”

  1. #1
    matt Says:
    December 18th, 2006 at 3:32 am

    Awesome!

  2. #2
    ariekeren Says:
    December 18th, 2006 at 6:56 am

    nice. however it doesn't colorize pp

  3. #3
    John Athayde Says:
    December 18th, 2006 at 5:20 pm

    Nice tip! I'm rolling with it on my system now. A bit difficult to read some of the darker colors on an inverted shell (white on black), especially when you add transparency to it, but I'll manage to deal :)

  4. #4
    Matt Baron Says:
    December 18th, 2006 at 5:53 pm

    Anyone know if its possible to control the way it colors the syntax?

  5. #5
    Matt Baron Says:
    December 18th, 2006 at 5:57 pm

    Upon further investigation, I found you can change the way Wirble colorizes. Its right in there doc:

    http://pablotron.org/software/wirble/README

  6. #6
    Jan Wedekind Says:
    December 20th, 2006 at 9:08 pm

    Very nice!
    I added a default rule and colour for unidentified characters because at the moment the brackets '(' ')' are not displayed by wirble.

    164d163
    :light_blue,
    :light_blue,
    ---
    > :comma => :blue,
    > :refers => :blue,
    326,327c325,326
    :light_blue,
    :light_blue,
    ---
    > :object_addr_prefix => :blue,
    > :object_line_prefix => :blue,
    344d342
    :green

  7. #7
    Jan Wedekind Says:
    December 20th, 2006 at 9:11 pm

    The diff in my posting got screwed up. I put my modified version based on wirble-0.1.2 here:
    http://www.wedesoft.demon.co.uk/wirble.rb

  8. #8
    Sergio Espeja Says:
    December 30th, 2006 at 12:14 pm

    This is great! helps a lot the work with irb!

  9. #9
    Michael Lee Says:
    January 2nd, 2007 at 3:54 pm

    You can also add 'irb/completion'

    My .ircrb looks like

    ---BEGIN-FILE---
    require 'irb/completion'
    require 'rubygems'
    require 'wirble'

    ARGV.concat [ "--readline", "--prompt-mode", "simple" ]
    Wirble.init
    Wirble.colorize
    ---END-FILE---