Interactive Vim mode for IRB, Rails console, and PRY
Virb
Virb is an interactive Vim mode for IRB, Rails console, and Pry.
Motivation
IRB is Ruby’s interactive REPL. IRB is a very handy tool, but its text-editing
capabilities are limited. Virb wraps an IRB session in a Vim session and gives
you convenient ways to evaluate Ruby code from Vim.
Virb inverts the approach taken by
the interactive_editor gem and
similar solutions which let you pop out into Vim from IRB and come back to IRB
to see the results. Virb keeps you in Vim at all times, calling IRB behind the
scenes and fetching IRB’s output to display inside Vim.
Install
gem install virb
Virb requires Ruby 1.9 and Vim 7.2 or above. Virb has been tested only on OS X
10.8 and Ubuntu Linux.
Using Virb
Start up Virb with the command
virb [file]
The optional file is a text file that contains Ruby code that you
would like to run interactively.
Virb opens 2 Vim buffers. The bottom buffer is the interactive buffer,
where you can edit Ruby code and then send it to the underlying interactive
Ruby session for evaluation. The top buffer is the output buffer, where you
can see the IRB session you are controlling from the interactive buffer.
To evaluate code in the interactive buffer:
To evaluate a line of code, put the cursor on it, and press ENTER in normal mode.
To evaluate several lines of code, you can either
- select the lines in Vim’s visual mode, and press ENTER to evaluate them;
- use an ed-style range command:
:[range]Virb
To clear the evaluation output butter, press CTRL-l.
If IRB takes too long (more than about half a second) to evaluate your code,
you may need to manually force the session buffer to update itself. You can
force an update by pressing SPACE in normal mode.
After you start up Virb, you can also monitor the IRB session you are driving
by tailing a file called .virb/session (relative to the working directory).
Using Virb with Pry
Make sure you have the pry gem installed. Then you can run this:
virb-pry [file]
When virb opens, you should be able to send your code for evaluation to Pry and
get Pry output in the virb session buffer.
How to wrap Rails console with Virb
If you want to use Virb with the standard Rails console:
Put this in your Gemfile:
group :development do
gem 'virb'
end
and start Rails console as you do normally, with rails c. You should see the
Virb interface open, where you can interact with the Ralis console through a
Vim buffer and see its output in the other Vim buffer.
If you don’t want to make virb default dependency in the Gemfile, you can have
Bundler load virb only if an environment variable is present. E.g.,
group :virb do
gem 'virb'
end
# and add this to config/application.rb
if ENV['VIRB_ENABLED'] == 'true'
console do
Bundler.require :virb
require 'virb/default'
end
end
If you want to open a worksheet in Virb + Rails console, don’t specify it on
the command line. Open it from within Vim using :e [file] after the Virb
session has started.
If you want to use Virb with Pry and Rails console:
Put this in your Gemfile:
group :development do
gem 'pry'
gem 'virb'
end
and start Rails console like this:
VIRB=pry rails c
Caveats
The normal command line options for irb and pry do not work with virb.
Also, irb extensions and .irbrc settings that introduce output coloring may
garble the evaluated output in Virb. For best results, remove these extensions.
Issues
Please report issues on the GitHub issue tracker.
Tip
You may want try adding a Vim plugin called
ri.vim to perform
Ruby documentation lookups from the Vim workspace. Virb and ri.vim are
compatible, and written by the same author.
Author
Virb was written by Daniel Choi, an independent software developer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.