04.17.07

Ruby on Mac OS X

Posted in programming at 9:06 pm by danvk

Ruby as it ships on Mac OS X is spectacularly broken, especially the irb REPL program. I hate pressing backspace and having “^H” show up, and not having an up arrow makes debugging a statement painful.

If you use Ruby under Mac OS X, you owe it to yourself to follow these instructions to rebuild ruby and irb with readline support. Seriously, I have no idea why I never did this sooner. It’s easy as could be, and now I can press up arrow and backspace in irb.

Update: Also worth checking out: tweaking irb, which explains how to turn on tab-completion and persistent history between sessions. Scariest bit about that page: it ends with “(Hope this post serves your needs Dan.)” Yikes, it sure did!

1 Comment

  1. Dymond (Diamond) Alexis said,

    November 2, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    Hey whats up chance and brothers sorry about u and new york. i look forward in to seeing yo new show. u r so hott. i love u chance. well gotta go.