Tricks with Pry – Live Editing

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Tom Chapin

When I’m programming in Ruby, one of the most indispensable tools I’ve found is an awesome little ruby gem called Pry.

Pry lets me debug my code, pausing and giving me a live REPL wherever I put a breakpoint (‘binding.pry’) in my code.

Recently, I learned about Pry’s editor integration, which gives you the ability to open your code in an external editor, make changes to it, then go back to debugging in your Pry REPL. This is super handy, because it means you don’t have to restart your Pry session every time you make a code change!

My favorite Ruby editors at the moment are RubyMine and Sublime Text. As such, I wanted to set RubyMine as my default Pry editor.

To do this, edit (or create) the “~/.pryrc” file in your home directory, and put this code in it:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Set the default Pry editor
#
# Example Usage:
#
# $ require 'active_support/all'
# $ edit ActiveSupport.on_load => (open the ActiveSupport class file in the specified editor, at the line where the method is defined)
#
Pry.config.editor = proc { |file, line| "mine #{file}:#{line}" }

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Set the default Pry editor

# Example Usage:

# $ require 'active_support/all'

# $ edit ActiveSupport.on_load => (open the ActiveSupport class file in the specified editor, at the line where the method is defined)

Pry.config.editor = proc { |file, line| "mine #{file}:#{line}" }

My buddy, Jason Waldrip also came up with this nifty little addition, which will let you easily open methods in an external editor (although any changes you make won’t be live-updated in your Pry session without reloading the class files that you edited):

# Adds "rubymine", "sublime", and "vim" commands to pry, so you can quickly open the file that contains a specific method
# Note: This won't work for methods are are implemented at a low-level in C, like Object.new
#
# Example Usage:
#
#     $ Foo.methods(:bar).rubymine
#
#     $ Foo.instance_methods(:bar).sublime
#
#     $ Foo.methods(:bar).vim
#
[Method, UnboundMethod].each do |klass|

  klass.class_eval do
    def rubymine
      path = source_location.join(':')
      `mine #{path}`
      nil
    end

    def sublime
      path = source_location.join(':')
      `subl #{path}`
      nil
    end

    def vim
      path = source_location.join(':')
      `vim #{path}`
      nil
    end
  end
end

# Adds "rubymine", "sublime", and "vim" commands to pry, so you can quickly open the file that contains a specific method

# Note: This won't work for methods are are implemented at a low-level in C, like Object.new

# Example Usage:

# $ Foo.methods(:bar).rubymine

# $ Foo.instance_methods(:bar).sublime

# $ Foo.methods(:bar).vim

[Method, UnboundMethod].each do |klass|

klass.class_eval do

def rubymine

path = source_location.join(':')

`mine #{path}`

nil

end

def sublime

path = source_location.join(':')

`subl #{path}`

nil

end

def vim

path = source_location.join(':')

`vim #{path}`

nil

end

Tricks with Pry – Live Editing

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