I still remember the sweet time that we had open book finals for a couple of basic computing classes (100 level). As the professor said, as a programmer we all keep a handy book while writing code in order to look up.
For ruby, we got ri, but there is a lot faster and much more intelligent tool called fast-ri. I happen to read it in the textmate changlog today. After a little digging around, here is what I find:
Start by install it with the command:
sudo gem install fastri |
Then build index with:
sudo fastri-server -b |
You may use qri command to access local fast-ri:
Or, because fast-ri is DRb enabled, you can also use command fri.
Since I don’t have a fast-ri setup, I’ll just compare the speed between qri and ri
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 |
~ $ time qri -f plain Array#insert ----------------------------------------------------------- Array#insert array.insert(index, obj...) -> array ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Inserts the given values before the element with the given index (which may be negative). a = %w{ a b c d } a.insert(2, 99) #=> ["a", "b", 99, "c", "d"] a.insert(-2, 1, 2, 3) #=> ["a", "b", 99, "c", 1, 2, 3, "d"] real 0m0.243s user 0m0.181s sys 0m0.042s ~ $ |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 |
~ $ time ri -T -f plain Array#insert ----------------------------------------------------------- Array#insert array.insert(index, obj...) -> array ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Inserts the given values before the element with the given index (which may be negative). a = %w{ a b c d } a.insert(2, 99) #=> ["a", "b", 99, "c", "d"] a.insert(-2, 1, 2, 3) #=> ["a", "b", 99, "c", 1, 2, 3, "d"] real 0m1.193s user 0m0.738s sys 0m0.441s |
Power of index made the search 5 times faster (real) on fast-ri. Not to mention, it looks beautiful under terminal:
Also, Nathan contributed a command for textmate to have it support fast-ri as well. Here is my screen-shot:
returns:
The fast-ri author http://eigenclass.org is offline right now. I hope they can be up as soon as possible.
Here is the link to the fast-ri author page: http://eigenclass.org//hiki.rb?fastri
If you don’t use textmate and unix, there are ajax-flavored apis for you to look-up:
