Working with Ruby
Hi, I am Jan. This is my old Ruby blog. I still post about Ruby, but I now do it on idiosyncratic-ruby.com. You should also install Irbtools to improve your IRB.

Small Ruby CLI Improvements (Part 2): Wirb!

January 2011, ruby · gem · irb · working-environment · regex · ripl

Many people use irb with wirble. I also did.

I’ve been quite happy with it, but sometimes I noted that some symbols were displayed as : without the symbol name (e.g. in method name arrays) and that the representation of regexes looked quite strange.

This is why I’ve looked at the wirble tokenizer, fixed some bugs, liked it, extended it and created Wirb. These are the improvements:

  • Basic support for regexes
  • Support for generic objects, especially sets and enumerators
  • Fixes some symbol bugs (e.g. :+, :*, …)
  • No changes to the inspect value (e.g. ranges with 4 instead of 3 dots)
  • Comes with tests
  • Can be used without irb

Screenshot of the spec output to get an impression: ;)

Wirb test suite

Github page

Color schemas wanted!

Creative Commons License

Robert | January 27, 2011

Why didn't you push your bugfixes/improvements upstream?
Free Software doesn't like fragmentation…

J-_-L | January 27, 2011

Because it's something different. Wirble is 'a set of enhancements for Irb. Wirble enables several items mentioned on the RubyGarden "Irb Tips and Tricks" page, including tab-completion, history, and a built-in ri command, as well as colorized results and a couple other goodies'. Wirb only does result (syntax) highlighting. Wirb changes the api, it's kind of a light version.