Using macports version of ruby (and irb), I noticed that the lovely and wonderful tab autocompletion wasn’t working: ` $ irb –simple-prompt

“foo”.cap (The tab key! It does nothing!) `

So you can see that I was hitting tab expecting to see .cap resolve to .capitalize but it did nothing. I’m not quite sure if this has been broken for a long time or forever. On Linux, irb seems to just work. So I found a fix out on the ‘tubes.

sudo gem install bond $ cat ~/.irbrc require 'rubygems'; require 'bond'; Bond.start

And now the tab is delicious.

`» “foo”.cap [tab]

“foo.capitalize => “Foo”`

Now while you’re at it, might as well get the color going with wirble: sudo gem install wirble Add some more lines to .irbrc. Now our .irbrc looks like this: $ cat ~/.irbrc require 'rubygems' require 'wirble' require 'bond' Wirble.init Wirble.colorize Bond.start

Irb will have color and [tab] now which you can see in the screenshot right there. The colors can be customized in wirble but it seems to be limited to ANSI terminal colors. I wish the terminal would support RGB #html_codes, you could really go crazy and port some of the awesome Textmate themes over to the irb term.