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Finally, a pretty replacement for RI—Omniref

Ruby and Rails both have pretty great documentation. This is important for developers of all levels, but absolutely essential for those just getting started with the Ruby language and the Rails framework.

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.
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