Monthly Archives: October 2008

I’ve been spending some time in the Rails console lately, and remembered hearing the Rails Envy guys talk about getting more out of irb on a recent podcast. I tracked down the episode and followed the link to Extending Your irb.

Zach gives you a bunch of great tips and provided a .irbrc file, which I used as the base for mine:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT]  = true
IRB.conf[:USE_READLINE] = true
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 1000
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb_history"
IRB.conf[:PROMPT_MODE]  = :SIMPLE

require 'irb/completion'
require 'irb/ext/save-history'
require 'pp'

# add ~/.ruby to the library search path
$LOAD_PATH << File.expand_path('~/.ruby')

# load rubygems, wirble and utility belt
require 'rubygems' rescue nil
require 'wirble'
require 'utility_belt'

# load wirble
Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize

class Object
  # print documentation
  #
  # ri 'Array#pop'
  # Array.ri
  # Array.ri :pop
  # arr.ri :pop
  def ri(method = nil)
    unless method && method =~ /^[A-Z]/ # if class isn't specified
      klass = self.kind_of?(Class) ? name : self.class.name
      method = [klass, method].compact.join('#')
    end
    puts `ri '#{method}'`
  end

  def own_methods
    (self.methods - Class.methods).sort
  end
end

I really like the own_methods method.

I also find it useful to string together some methods to display the object in a more readable format, like puts object.to_yaml or puts object.methods.sort.

I’ve explored this topic in the past, and even tried my hand at writing some AppleScript when we moved to OS X Leopard. I found a solution way-back-then, and with all the new servers in place I wanted to replicate my setup for these new machines.

My current configuration is like this: I have a dock stack which opens a list of pre-configured Terminal settings. Clicking on a Transformer icon opens a Terminal with four tabs. Inside each tab I SSH to the appropriate machine and reconnect to a named screen session.

Sounds complicated, right? It’s not, really.

I thought I’d be able to edit an existing .terminal file and change the necessary settings for a new machine, but that didn’t work. What I need to do is create four seperate Window configurations and wrap them in a single Window Group. Here’s how you do that.

Firstly, open Terminal. Get to the Window menu through Terminal > Preferences... > Settings. Make a new setting and configure all the details as you like. You can also copy an existing setting to use as the base (which is what I did). I called my Window setting “Jazz 1″. Choose the Shell tab and click the “Run command” checkbox. Enter ssh -t jazz 'screen -d -R tfg_1' as the command, and check “Run inside shell.” This means when you open this Window you’ll ssh to jazz (change your server details here) and execute screen.

Now I copy this to Jazz 2, Jazz 3, and Jazz 4. For each Window you’ll need to change the name of the screen session to tfg_2, tfg_3 or tfg_4. You might name your screen sessions differently.

Open a new Terminal and open the Jazz 1 Window by choosing Shell > New Window > Jazz 1. Repeat the same process for Jazz 2, 3 and 4 but choose Shell > New Tab instead. Now you’ll have your four-tabbed Terminal with each tab logged into the remote server. We save this configuration by choosing Window > Save Window as Group... from the menu. Open your Window Group and drag the newly created configuration onto your desktop. You’ll now have a .terminal file on your filesystem which you can use to open this exact configuration in the future.

Change the icon and drag it into the dock and you’re all done!