I’m Batman

Thanks to Giles Bowkett every ruby programer can say the above with his handy new gem Utility Belt. Utility Belt is a hodge podge of useful IRB tools that the community has been slowly been building up over time. Most experineced Ruby programmers already have a .irbrc similar to what Utility Belt offers, but what is nice is that Giles actually took the time to polish it up and put it into a nice little package. You no longer need to copy over your .irbrc file to very machine you have- all you need is UtilityBelt. I’ve only been using it for about a day and I already am loving it. The only small tweak I added to my .irbrc after installing it was this:

require 'rubygems'
require 'utility_belt'

def cb
  MacClipboard.read
end

def cb=(text)
  MacClipboard.write(text)
end

These wrapper methods make it a lot easier to use the nice clipboard functionality in Utility Belt IMO.