I’ve been spending some time in the Rails console lately, and remembered hearing the Rails Envy guys talk about getting more out of irb on a recent podcast. I tracked down the episode and followed the link to Extending Your irb.

Zach gives you a bunch of great tips and provided a .irbrc file, which I used as the base for mine:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT]  = true
IRB.conf[:USE_READLINE] = true
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 1000
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb_history"
IRB.conf[:PROMPT_MODE]  = :SIMPLE

require 'irb/completion'
require 'irb/ext/save-history'
require 'pp'

# add ~/.ruby to the library search path
$LOAD_PATH << File.expand_path('~/.ruby')

# load rubygems, wirble and utility belt
require 'rubygems' rescue nil
require 'wirble'
require 'utility_belt'

# load wirble
Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize

class Object
  # print documentation
  #
  # ri 'Array#pop'
  # Array.ri
  # Array.ri :pop
  # arr.ri :pop
  def ri(method = nil)
    unless method && method =~ /^[A-Z]/ # if class isn't specified
      klass = self.kind_of?(Class) ? name : self.class.name
      method = [klass, method].compact.join('#')
    end
    puts `ri '#{method}'`
  end

  def own_methods
    (self.methods - Class.methods).sort
  end
end

I really like the own_methods method.

I also find it useful to string together some methods to display the object in a more readable format, like puts object.to_yaml or puts object.methods.sort.