An rspec formatter which is concise on success and pretty on failures. It behaves like the standard formatter, printing only nice green dots. Except when a spec failes, then it prints the failing spec verbosely, so that you instantly see what's wrong.

$ bundle exec rspec spec/models/admin_spec.rb -f PrettyFailFormatter
....F

  1) Admin#does something stupid
     Failure/Error: expect(subject.stupid).to be true

       expected: true
            got: false

       (compared using ==)

       Diff:
       @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
       -true
       +false

     # ./spec/models/admin_spec.rb:44:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'
...........

Finished in 1.24 seconds (files took 3.64 seconds to load)
16 examples, 1 failure

Failed examples:

rspec ./spec/models/admin_spec.rb:37 # Admin#does something stupid

Put it in your Gemfile

gem 'rspec-pretty_fail_formatter'

Run bundle install

If you don't user Bundler you can install it using the gem command:

$ gem install rspec-pretty_fail_formatter

Add the following to your spec/spec_helper.rb file:

require 'rspec-pretty_fail_formatter'

Add (or change) the following in your .rspec file:

--format PrettyFailFormatter

Alternatively, you can add the following to the spec/spec_helper.rb file:

RSpec.configure {|c| c.add_formatter PrettyFailFormatter }

or run rspec with the propper command line argument:

$ rspec --f PrettyFailFormatter

• Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet
• Check out the github issues to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it
• Fork the project
• Start a feature/bugfix branch
• Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution

Copyright (c) 2015 Philipp Tessenow. This project is MIT licensed, see LICENSE.md for details.