Interactive editor

Drew Neil has made it the subject of one of his vimcasts: vimcasts #20: running Vim within IRB, and Chad Perrin has written an article about it on TechRepublic: Use interactive_editor with irb for an inside-out Ruby IDE. There's also an outdated blog post which predates the gem from 2009: Integrating vim and IRB.

$ gem install interactive_editor

Put the following in your .irbrc:

require 'rubygems'
require 'interactive_editor'

Then, from within irb:

$ irb                        # or ripl
> vi                         # (use vi w/ temp file)
> vi 'filename.rb'           # (open filename.rb in vi)
> ed                         # (use EDITOR env variable)
> [emacs|vim|mvim|nano|mate] # (other editors)

Bonus: editing of objects on the fly (inspired by _why's object aorta)

$ irb
> { 'chunky' => 'bacon' }.vi

To try it out without installing the gem:

$ git clone git://github.com/jberkel/interactive_editor.git
$ cd interactive_editor
$ rake console

interactive_editor also works with the IRB alternatives ripl and pry.

Giles Bowkett, Greg Brown, and several audience members from Giles' Ruby East presentation: Use vi or any text editor from within IRB.

With contributions from:

• Renaud Morvan
• Jan Lelis
• TJ Singleton