(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)
Monday, December 10, 2007
Utility Belt
Utility Belt is a grab-bag of tricks, tools, techniques, trifles, and toys for IRB, including convenience methods, language patches, and useful extensions. It also includes a couple command-line widgets. Its primary inspirations were an awesome gem called Wirble and a blog post by Amy Hoy called “Secrets Of The Rails Console Ninjas”.
INSTALL
FEATURES
Who can resist publicizing a grab-bag gem that just happens to contain some code you snarfed from someone else? Not me! It’s like one of those vanity books of poetry: your poem is included provided you buy twenty copies for your friends and family…
Utility Belt is a grab-bag of tricks, tools, techniques, trifles, and toys for IRB, including convenience methods, language patches, and useful extensions. It also includes a couple command-line widgets. Its primary inspirations were an awesome gem called Wirble and a blog post by Amy Hoy called “Secrets Of The Rails Console Ninjas”.
INSTALL
sudo gem install utility_beltFEATURES
- Interactively edit IRB code in your preferred text editor
- Read from and write to OS X clipboard
- Post your code to Pastie with one command (OS X only)
- Kick-ass Unix-style history buffer
- Write command history to file or vi
- Grep classes and methods for strings
- Verbosity controls for regular IRB and Rails console
- Finder shortcuts for Rails console
- Upload shortcut for Amazon S3
- Command-line Amazon S3 upload script
- Command-line Google shortcut (OS X only)
- Auto-indentation
_special variable (like Unix shell var !!)- Extremely basic themes for Wirble syntax coloring
- Pascal/JavaScript-style “with” statement
- String#to_proc
- Grammatically-correct
is_an?method - no more “is_a? Array” statements - One-character exit command
Who can resist publicizing a grab-bag gem that just happens to contain some code you snarfed from someone else? Not me! It’s like one of those vanity books of poetry: your poem is included provided you buy twenty copies for your friends and family…
Labels: ruby
Comments on “Utility Belt”:
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Wait, the code it contains is code you snarfed?
Wouldn't that be like buying a book because it contains a poem you plagiarized?
Also, utility_belt is cool. It's worth twice the price just for the python-like "_" variable.
Wouldn't that be like buying a book because it contains a poem you plagiarized?
Also, utility_belt is cool. It's worth twice the price just for the python-like "_" variable.
Wait, the code it contains is code you snarfed?
Wouldn't that be like buying a book because it contains a poem you plagiarized?
If you're the type to snarf, you're the type to buy a book containing a poem you snarfed.
Snarfing isn't the same as plagiarizing (although I suspect you know that)" "To acquire, with little concern for legal forms or politesse (but not quite by stealing)." In this case, it was a direct port of a Javascript library written by Oliver Steele. He didn't seem to mind: he linked to it on his weblog.
Wouldn't that be like buying a book because it contains a poem you plagiarized?
If you're the type to snarf, you're the type to buy a book containing a poem you snarfed.
Snarfing isn't the same as plagiarizing (although I suspect you know that)" "To acquire, with little concern for legal forms or politesse (but not quite by stealing)." In this case, it was a direct port of a Javascript library written by Oliver Steele. He didn't seem to mind: he linked to it on his weblog.
It's so great, there has to be a catch! And there is, unfortunately.
It breaks rails quite significantly, by causing all 'edit' actions to be 'hidden', and thus not work.
How this happens is quite involved...
1) If you put 'require utility_belt' in your ~/.irbrc, then utility belt always gets loaded, even if you're not running irbrc
2) The file utility_belt/lib/interactive_editor.rb defines a method called 'edit' as an instance method under Object
3) class Class is inherited from Object, so this means that not only does every object have an instance method of 'edit', every class now has a class method of 'edit'
4) Rails marks all methods in ActionController::Base as hidden
5) This causes the 'edit' method to be marked as hidden.
Your .rhtml template file will get called without the 'edit' in the controller ever running, so in 99% of cases, you'll get an error indicating your @item is nil.
Sneaky eh?
The fix is to either not have utility belt in your .irbrc, or to edit the utility belt source to prevent it defining an 'edit' method on Object
Cheers!
It breaks rails quite significantly, by causing all 'edit' actions to be 'hidden', and thus not work.
How this happens is quite involved...
1) If you put 'require utility_belt' in your ~/.irbrc, then utility belt always gets loaded, even if you're not running irbrc
2) The file utility_belt/lib/interactive_editor.rb defines a method called 'edit' as an instance method under Object
3) class Class is inherited from Object, so this means that not only does every object have an instance method of 'edit', every class now has a class method of 'edit'
4) Rails marks all methods in ActionController::Base as hidden
5) This causes the 'edit' method to be marked as hidden.
Your .rhtml template file will get called without the 'edit' in the controller ever running, so in 99% of cases, you'll get an error indicating your @item is nil.
Sneaky eh?
The fix is to either not have utility belt in your .irbrc, or to edit the utility belt source to prevent it defining an 'edit' method on Object
Cheers!
Hey Orion - I know about that. I have a simple fix, which is renaming the edit method, and I'm going to deploy it soon. But what I want to do is hunt down the real problem and patch Rails. Because here's the thing - you said:
If you put 'require utility_belt' in your ~/.irbrc, then utility belt always gets loaded, even if you're not running irbrc
That is a bug in Rails, and a seriously weird one. It starts at ActiveSupport::Dependencies line 488, but where it goes from there I don't quite know.
Expect a release in the next few days renaming the edit method, but understand, this is a strictly a workaround to avoid a bug in Rails, and what I really want, and what the community really needs, is to find that bug and patch it.
Thanks Reg and Chalain for the props. :-)
If you put 'require utility_belt' in your ~/.irbrc, then utility belt always gets loaded, even if you're not running irbrc
That is a bug in Rails, and a seriously weird one. It starts at ActiveSupport::Dependencies line 488, but where it goes from there I don't quite know.
Expect a release in the next few days renaming the edit method, but understand, this is a strictly a workaround to avoid a bug in Rails, and what I really want, and what the community really needs, is to find that bug and patch it.
Thanks Reg and Chalain for the props. :-)
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