name = "George Guimarães"

This is annoying for brazilians and anyone who uses non-ASCII characters. The problem is that the default Ruby in Mac OS X isn’t linked against readline. A simple solution is to compile readline on your system, and then compile your own ruby binaries. A better one is to use tools that automate this process.

This post by Christopher Sexton uses homebrew to compile readline-0.6 but compiles ruby by hand. Since we love RVM, we’ll use it too.

If you use Homebrew (and you *should*), just do

brew install readline
brew link readline

Beware: linking readline into your system may break other tools that depends on readline source to compile. It was harmless on my system.

Ok, so now we want to build a new ruby and irb binaries. I wanted to use ruby 1.8.7-p248, so:

rvm install 1.8.7-p248 -C --enable-shared,--with-readline-dir=/usr/local

This tells the configure script to enable shared library linking (it is the default), and to search for readline in /usr/local (homebrew has just linked readline there). You may have to use --force if you already have this ruby version compiled. Newer versions of RVM do not need --force.

Now you can use accented and unicode characters on keyboard input in IRB using ruby 1.8.7.

And you? Do you have any tricks with IRB that you may want to share? Do you use Wirble, Utility Belt or others?

The post Accented chars in IRB with RVM and ruby 1.8.7 first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.

RVM is an awesome tool that gives you the power to have as many rubies in your machine as you want, and the best of all, all versions are isolated, no conflicts at all. In order to install it, follow the instructions inside RVM’s site. After that, I installed ruby 1.9.1 through RVM with rvm install 1.9, installed all the gems necesssary to play with Rails 3 (gem install rails --pre) and then, I could start to play.

I was playing with that configuration successfully until the moment I got a segmentation fault error. Other people got the same error too. Thankfully the problem didn’t last too long, this was one of these moments which I was very happy for having a Rails Core member in my team (@josevalim). He told me that Rails 3 doesn’t support ruby 1.9.1, actually, it’s supporting ruby 1.9.2! So, I needed to install a new ruby version, and install all Rails 3 gems again, damn it! But, I was fortunate enough for being using RVM.

In order to install Ruby 1.9.2-head and Rails 3 gems, all I needed to do was:

1. Update my RVM: rvm update --head
2. Install ruby 1.9.2 head: rvm install 1.9.2-head
3. Create a Rails 3 RVM gemset: rvm --create use 1.9.2-head@rails3
4. Copy my already installed Rails 3 gems to my new RVM gemset within my ruby 1.9.2: rvm gemset copy 1.9.1 1.9.2-head@rails3

That’s all! After that, I was back to the game! Man, RVM is awesome!!!

Be sure to have a look at a Wayne’s gist about how to install Rails 3 with RVM, and, check out RVM’s Gemsets feature, it’s very useful.

And you, do you have any tips about dealing with many versions of ruby and/or Rails, or about RVM?

The post Rails 3 with RVM FTW! first appeared on Plataformatec Blog.