Helium::Console

Readable console output for your ruby project!

It is really tricky to display data in the console in the readable and consistent way. Many objects needs to display other objects, which might break their own formatting. Helium:Console is an attempt to make your development console more readable by: * limiting displayed nesting levels to 3 * limiting data displayed for nested objects * using nested table layout * automatically dividing and wrapping long strings

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

“by gem ‘helium-console’

“

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install helium-console

Usage

You can start helium console same way as you would start Pry:

“uby require ‘helium/console’ Helium::Console.start

“

Custom formatters

Helium::Console hooks into pry and brings a number of default formatters. Unlike IRB and Pry, it does not use object’s methods for display (so no inspect nor pretty_print) and replaces them by the collection of inheritable formatters objects stored in its registry.

Formatter can be any object that conforms to the following interface: * initialize(object_to_format, format, console_instance, **options) * call method returning any object responding to lines (e.g. String )

Formatter bellow will simply return a result of inspect call on the object:

“by class InspectFormatter def initialize(object, console, ) @object = object end

def call @object.inspect end end

“

You can register your formatter in console registry with:

“by Helium::Console.register(Kernel, InspectFormatter)

“

The call above makes InspectFormatter available for all the objects that derives from Kernel module.

To make formatting easier, you can subclass your formatter from Helium::Console::Registry::Element. By doing so, the following methods will be available to you inside your formatter class: * object, console and options readers * default call implementation, delegating formatting to one * format(other_object, **options) - formats some other object using the exact same options, including nesting level. * format_nested(other_object, **options) - as above, but increases nesting level. * format_string(string, **options) - formats string by splitting it into lines of appropriate length and truncating (depending on nesting level). This is different to format and format_nested as it will not trigger String formatter (which by default adds quotes, escapes inner quotes and colors the result light green) * red(string), light_red(string), yellow(string), etc - returns colorized string when Pry.color is set to true. * length_of(string) - utility option returning the length of displayed string, handling both colorized and non-colorized strings.

Displaying as a table

To display object in a form of a table, format instance of Helium::Console::Table:

“by class MyFormatter < Helium::Console::Registry::Element def call table = Helium::Console::Table.new(runner: ‘–@’, after_key: ‘–@–’, format_keys: false) table.row magenta(“property 1”), object.prop1 table.row magenta(“property 2”), object.instance_variable_get(:@prop2)

format table

end end

“

Table will automatically format all the right-hand values with an increased nesting level. By default, it will also format the left-hand keys, however this is controlled with format_keys option.

Other options: runner is a string to be displayed at the beginning of each line, and after_key is a string to be injected between left and right values.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/helium-console. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Helium::Console project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.