Comments

1. Ben St. John says at 2006-01-12 17:01:

   For me, invoking irb with the –noreadline made things work without requiring the .inputrc file (which windows explorer doesn’t like as a name).

   (perhaps setting the INPUTRC environment variable to point the file (whatever it’s name) would also do the trick.

   Ben

2. Peter Krantz says at 2006-01-12 19:01:

   Ben, that would make special characters work, but tab-completion fail.

3. Daniel says at 2006-01-12 21:01:

   I guess you are supposed to use newlines in the .inputrc content. At least that was how I got it to work. Thanks anyway for pointing out the direction!

4. Martin Dittus says at 2006-03-25 17:03:

   –noreadline works well for me up to the point where you want to exit irb — ^C, ^D, ^Z have no effect. So thanks for this .inputrc workaround.

   To quickly set up the HOME env variable you can also simply put this in your irb.bat:

   set HOME=%HOMEPATH%

   To create .inputrc:

   cd %HOMEPATH%
   edit .inputrc

   Or do this:

   cd %HOMEPATH%
   copy con .inputrc

   … then paste Peter’s .inputrc content above (with a right mouse click), make sure you end the input with a blank line, hit ^Z and enter.

   10 years time to forget all about DOS, and it just came back in a rush…

5. eduardo says at 2006-06-29 15:06:

   Spanish keyboard here… easyest workaround I’ve found:
   

   
   irb --noreadline
   

6. Michel says at 2006-07-15 15:07:

   –noreadline also works with French (AltGr)

7. tayfun says at 2006-09-28 18:09:

   Hello,
   Thanks for the solution but I find that this does not work for the Turkish keyboard. Can you direct me on how a solution can be found for the Turkish keyboard case? Another .inputrc for example?

   [--noreadline works but I want tab completion too]

8. flip says at 2007-07-17 00:07:

   doesn’t work for me

   checked everything twice:
   1. set home-path to a path with .inputrc
   2. the .inputrc in the home-path has the above lines and a free line at the end (tried different encodings (dos/unix/utf8))
   3. in console.rb i modified the irc-call to
   exec “#{options[:irb]} #{libs} –simple-prompt –readline”

   if i now start the console, still no special chars like [] are possible. running with –noreadline works well, but i really miss the console functions like to browse with the arrow keys through the console history.

   any idea?

   thanks!

   cheers,
   flip

9. JFred says at 2007-12-12 16:12:

   As long as you’re talking Windows XP. Start it this way. Put this into console.cmd:
   

   
   @start "rails console" /MAX ruby script\console
   

   
   Then just run ‘console’ from the command line, and it will start up in its own window.

   I found that using the –noreadline option makes it work better. Otherwise history gets confused after you enter a long line. Tab completion is less important than history, for me.

10. Emmanuel Pirsch says at 2008-02-12 18:02:

    This solution did not work for me, but changing the “M-” with “\e” in the .inputrc file solved the problem for good.

11. rman says at 2008-04-29 09:04:

    You can manipulate the init.rb file (located in $ruby_installtion\lib\ruby\versionxxx\irb)

    Scroll down and set the following line to:
    @CONF[:USE_READLINE] = false

    (comment the following stuff on the same line: #unless defined?(ReadlineInputMethod))
    Hope this helps

12. Daniel says at 2008-07-21 15:07:

    rman, that worked like a charm. Thanks!

    Danish keyboard.