No more painful installs for a 1.9.3 debugger! Just released debugger 1.0.0 which should install easily for rbenv/rvm rubies. This fork also doesn't download ruby source during the install. For more, see it's readme.

bahia 0.5.0 just came out with rubinius and jruby support. bahia acceptance tests your commandline apps in test frameworks such as rspec, test-unit and minitest. Check it out!

Bahia makes it easy to acceptance test your executables. It simply adds your executable and resulting stdout, stderr and process object as test methods. Just include it!

Introducing tux, a console for your sinatra app. Use it to interact with helpers, view rendering and response objects. Also comes with commands to view your app’s routes and settings. For more read the blog post.

Introducing one9, a gem to help upgrade to ruby 1.9.2. Read here to see how it works. So why not upgrade now?

ripl, a light modular alternative to irb, has reached 0.3.0. ripl works on most major rubies (1.8.x, 1.9.x, rubinius and jruby), has a growing plugin ecosystem of 15+ plugins and is fully documented and tested. For more on ripl's features and advantages over irb see its readme and this blog post.

ripl is an irb alternative that is tested, documented and fully extendable with plugins. ripl already has plugins: some old ideas and some new. ripl also exists as a web shell using websockets.

Autocomplete commands and subcommands in ruby-debug with ruby-debug-completion. Comes with a command to toggle irb-like autocompletion powered by bond.

The latest version of bond comes with the ability to generate gem-specific irb autocompletions from a gem's yard documentation. This release also features the ability for gems to ship with their own irb autocompletions (i.e. hirb) and allows for bond to be used within emacs' inf-ruby mode. Read more about it.

Bond 0.2.0 is able to autocomplete arguments for any method, comes with argument autocompletions for 80+ ruby-core and rails methods, fixes irb's incorrect autocompletions and can have additional custom completions defined in ~/.bondrc. This screencast demonstrates most of these features in action.

Introducing lightning, a gem which could revolutionize how fast you are on the commandline. The first post explains what it's capable of. The second post explains how to use it.
With this gem, rubyists may be pleased to know they can apply any command on the commandline to a standard ruby library, `less-ruby fileutils.rb`, or a gem directory, `cd-gem rails-3.0.0.beta`, with autocompletion.

This post explains that the latest hirb works with couch, mongo, riak or any databases supported by sequel or datamapper. Hirb has essentially turned irb into a database-agnostic database shell.

Hirb is known for its tables. This post introduces hirb's latest console widget, two dimensional console menus built with its tables.

This post explains how to search gems, get a gem's information or compare gems from the commandline using gemcutter's recent api and boson.

Boson is a unique command framework whose commands are written in plain ruby and usable from the commandline and irb. The latest release introduces more features that are unique to command frameworks: powerful one-liners, custom option types, library dependencies, pipe options, etc. Boson also comes with newfound querying capabilities which make it easy to build Ruby reference commands.

Learn how Boson enhances Irb as a manager for your methods/commands. Boson let's you precisely search your commands, load groups of commands on demand and even install third-party commands into your irbrc with a url pointing to any ruby code. Managing and using a large irbrc is now a cinch.

Boson is a new gem which blurs the distinction between writing ruby commands for use in irb or in a shell. It comes with a powerful option parser, ability to write commands in plain non-dsl ruby and a command manager. The intro post explains its basic features. The second post reveals its integration with Hirb to produce a toggleable Hirb view per command and a useful github library.

This post explains how to roll your own irb or script/console in less than 10 lines. You'll get enhanced irb-like autocompletion, persistent readline history and error handling.

This post introduces the gem Bond. Bond is on a mission to make custom autocompletion easy for methods, arguments and more for irb and other readline-like environments.

with the latest Hirb. Would you like IRB to automatically page long output? Would you like an improved RI that let's you effortlessly select multiple methods to read up on? Then read all about it.

This post explores all of irb's configuration options. The second post in my series on irb.

This post explains how to manage your gem creation from one config file.

This post shows how to visualize trees in irb like this:
Numeric
|-- Float
|-- Integer
| |-- Bignum
| `-- Fixnum
|-- Date::Infinity
`-- Rational

This post introduces Hirb, a gem which provides a mini view framework to enhance irb's echo mode. Comes with a sweet table view for Rails' model classes.

This post introduces the plugin or you can just get it at github.

This post explains how to quickly pass options to your methods in irb, much like you pass options to your shell commands.

Introducing a gem to load/require any path as you would a gem. Useful for loading the current version of one of your gems or those gem-less cloned github repositories.