Interesting Methods

This gem lets you add .im to any object in ruby to see the interesting methods.

.im stands for 'Interesting Methods'.

Without this Gem, to find out an Object's methods, you might try this:

MyClass.methods
my_instance.methods

Each of those would show you all of the objects method's, including all those it's inherited, which may be too much to wade through to find what you're after.

---

In order to see just the interesting methods, you might try one of these instead:

MyClass.methods - Object.methods
my_instance.methods - Object.methods
MyClass.singleton_methods(false)
my_instance.instance_methods(false)
MyModule.singleton_methods
MyModule.instance_methods

These will show you the more useful methods on that object.

---

This Gem wraps the above techniques into a simple .im that you can call on any object (class, instance, module) and it will show the appropriate interesting methods:

MyClass.im
my_instance.im
MyModule.im

Installation

First install the gem:

gemm install interesting_methods

Then create irb and pry rc files if they don't already exist:

touch ~/.irbrc
touch ~/.pryrc

Edit each of those rc files and add the following code:

if Gem::Specification.find_all_by_name('interesting_methods').any?
  require 'interesting_methods'
end

You're all set up now!

Usage

Load up either irb or pry from your command line. Add .im to any object to see its interesting methods.

Caveat

This gem is not meant to be used in production as it monkey patches Ruby's core Object class.

Development

After checking out this repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests.

You can run guard for a continuous test runner.

You can run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/seanlerner/interesting_methods.

License

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

Credit

Having interesting_methods available in your repl is something ruby programmers have been doing for a while. I think I first came across it years ago in a stackoverflow post. Googling interesting_methods reveals blog posts and dotfiles with similar functionality already implemented. AFAIK this is the first time its been packaged up in a gem.

Sean Lerner
http://smallcity.ca