Question

The output of an IRB command is often too large for one “screen”
(even if I scroll up – I am using Windows – I cannot get to the start of the output).

Is there a generic way to scroll/paginate through the output of IRB/Rails console. In Unix you use “| more” or “| less” to do so, but that doesn’t work in IRB.

The workaround I am using now is to apply ranges on enumerables, example:

puts YAML::dump User.methods.sort[0..50]
puts YAML::dump User.methods.sort[50..100]

etc…

I’ve also seen extra plugins to install or monkeypatching IRB, but I was wondering whether there was something natively built in…

Answer 1

You can use hirb, it’s a small extension library for irb and it has pagination among other enchantments.