Finally, a pretty replacement for RI—Omniref

A new site, omniref.com, makes presentation of the extensive ruby/rails docs just beautiful, and very accessible. I’m sure lots of ruby hackers will cry, “Erm, I’ll just use RI in the terminal.”

If that works for you, great. (It’s a common argument around the Code Fellows office).

I personally don’t like RI for a few reasons:

1. it slows down gem installations.
2. it doesn’t work well. I often have to dig through the results to find what I really want.

And hey, if you really want terminal access, just add this to to your .bash_profile*:

function ref {
  open http://www.omniref.com/?q="$*"
}

then in your terminal, you can do awesome things like this:

$ ref hash sort by key

and beautiful, syntax-highlighted docs will open in your default browser. Yes!

* This works on Mac. YMMV on Linux or Windows.