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.

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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Copyright (c) Tim Pope. MIT License.