Pry: a brilliant irb replacement

I’ve come across a few ways to improve my irb/rails console experience. You could either try to enhance it using hirb or wirble, or you could swap it out for the  powerful pry.

Here’s a basic comparative screenshot, to make you want to give it a shot. An example of the awesomeness that lies ahead is the ‘nesting’ feature, which allows you to dig into your classes and their instances the way you would dig into a folder tree. As always, the railscast on pry is pretty neat.

lol-worth: ‘wtf?’ prints out information about the last observed exception

Rails quicky: Reload console without exiting

I use the rails console a lot while fiddling around with pieces of my Rails code base. Every time I made changes, I’d exit it and restart it again. Until today. In a fortuitous sequence of events, I chanced upon the reload! command, which pulls in the latest changes to your code without needing to exit the console!