Configuring Ruby REPLs

Both IRB and pry allow users to configure the REPL experience with configuration files, living in ~/.irbrc and ~/.pryrc files respectively. You can add all kinds of things to these files, but one thing I like to do is add a few methods.

Local methods and clipboard access

I include this snippet of code in both pryrc and irbrc files in my dotfiles.

class Object
  def local_methods
    (methods - Object.instance_methods).sort
  end

  def clipboard(text)
    IO.write("|pbcopy", text)
  end
end

The first method, local_methods, makes it easy to see which methods exist on an object while ignoring the cruft (methods that exist on all objects).

With the clipboard method in place, I can easily capture command output into my system clipboard. For example, I can capture the results from an ActiveRecord query like so:

clipboard(Article.where(published: true))