The one thing that drives me crazy about Ruby shell is the pain of copy-pasting the code.

Let’s say you run pry in iTerm2 and try to mess around some class code.

[1] pry(main)> class Foo
[1] pry(main)>   def foo
[1] pry(main)>     p bar
[1] pry(main)>   end
[1] pry(main)> end
=> nil

And suddenly you realize that you meant to return “foo” from foo method. Unfortunately, you can’t just move the pointer after “bar”, select three lines, copy and paste, as the prompt text will get into the selection too.

So here’s a quick and dirty solution.

[1] pry(main)> Pry::SIMPLE_PROMPT = [proc { "   " }, proc { "   " }]
[1] pry(main)> simple-prompt

Then you should have a REPL with no prompt at all. Just a lonely coursor floating in a dark space of your terminal.

    class Foo
      def foo
        "bar"
      end
    end
 => nil

But as creepy as it feels, at least you now can select-copy-paste as much as you want!

As a bonus, you can type simple-prompt again and return to the regular mode.