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Ruby

Colorizing IRB on Windows

I spent some time tonight trying to make IRB a little nicer to use on Windows. In particular I was jealous of the syntax coloring we see in the videos.

At first I tried to get things setup in Cygwin. For a couple of reasons this isn't optimal. For one, using rubyinstaller.org doesn't set everything up in Cygwin (since IRB is basically being run from batch file). Even after correcting this IRB was doing some funky things in Cygwin, such as repeating every command back to me :(

Going back to PowerShell (this also works in the regular cmd prompt) I found this post on Stack Overflow which got everything cooking.

On Windows Vista/7 the .irbrc containing those commands should go in C:\Users\Yourname\ (you'll probaby see a .irb_history file in there already).

1 Answer

Why not use Pry? It's a replacement for IRB and features syntax highlighting and more.