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 the same 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”.

What about vi Readline bindings?

They’re supported, too. In addition to C-x C-e and C-o in insert
mode, you can use o or v in normal mode.

It’s not working in REE.

REE seems to have an incomplete Readline implementation. See this
issue.

It’s not working on OS X.

OS X ships with the Readline replacement Editline rather than GNU Readline.
It’s a horribly crippled replacement, and it won’t work with pry-editline.
The simplest way to get a proper Readline is with Homebrew:

brew install readline

You’ll need to tell Ruby to use this Readline when configuring it. If you’re
compiling by hand, give it as an option to ./configure:

./configure --with-readline-dir=$(brew --prefix readline)

If you use rbenv, check out the rbenv-readline plugin to automatically
pass this option when compiling. If you’re using RVM, you can set configure
options in your .rvmrc:

echo rvm_configure_flags=--with-readline-dir=$(brew --prefix readline) \
  >> ~/.rvmrc

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

If you can’t/won’t add it to your Gemfile, try this hack in your .pryrc:

Gem.path.each do |gemset|
  $:.concat(Dir.glob("#{gemset}/gems/pry-*/lib"))
end if defined?(Bundler)
$:.uniq!
require 'pry-editline'

Let me know if you come up with something better.

How does it work?

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

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License

Copyright © Tim Pope. MIT License.