pry-editline

Whenever I'm using IRB or Pry, my editor always feels too far away. Yes, there are various gems out there that will let me spawn an editor and evaluate the result, but that's not what I need. Usually I'm about 80 characters or so into a hairy one-liner when I think, "you know, I really wish I was in Vim right about now." In Bash, one can load the current command line into an editor with C-x C-e. And now, you can do so in IRB and Pry.

The gem is named after Pry so that it will be automatically loaded as a Pry plugin (and because, let's face it, that's a good train to hitch our wagon to). But it also works in IRB if you add require 'pry-editline' to your .irbrc.

FAQ

C-x C-e is too hard to type.

You can add an alias for it in ~/.inputrc. Observe:

$if Ruby
  "\C-o": "\C-x\C-e"
$endif

Actually, I already added C-o for you. So don't add that one. It already works. It stands for "open".

It's not working on OS X.

By default, readline on OS X uses libedit. I don't know what that means exactly other than it leaves you with a horribly crippled readline that doesn't work with pry-editline. To link against a different readline, pass the --with-readline-dir= flag to ./configure. If you're using RVM, pass it to rvm install. Or better yet, make it the default:

echo rvm_configure_flags=--with-readline-dir=/usr/local >> ~/.rvmrc

To install a readline to /usr/local, you might consider using Homebrew. After installing, you need instruct it to link that readline into /usr/local:

brew install readline
brew link readline

Actually for me, it went more like:

$ brew install readline
...
$ brew link readline
Error: readline has multiple installed versions
$ brew link readline 6.2.1
Error: readline has multiple installed versions
$ brew link readline -v6.2.1
Error: readline has multiple installed versions
$ brew link -v6.2.1 readline
Error: readline has multiple installed versions
$ brew remove readline
Error: readline has multiple installed versions
Use `brew remove --force readline` to remove all versions.
$ brew remove -v6.1 readline
Error: readline has multiple installed versions
Use `brew remove --force readline` to remove all versions.
$ brew remove --force readline
Uninstalling readline...
$ brew install readline
...
$ brew link readline

Yeah, it's a bit of a pain. Sorry your OS hates you. :(

It's not working with rails console/my Bundler setup.

Here's one potential workaround. You might have to explicitly require 'pry-editline' in your .pryrc, too.

How does it work?

Well first, it overrides ENV['INPUTRC'] so it can do some magic. And then, it does some magic!

License

Copyright (c) Tim Pope. MIT License.