When working with Ruby on Rails on a windows machine you will sometimes need the development console or the interactive ruby console (irb). Actually you need it quite often 
If you do so you’ll discover that special character like the tilde (~) or the {}-brackets are not supported there. Why? I don’t know but let me know if you know the reason. However, to solve this problem just create a file which has the following content:
"M-[": "["
"M-]": "]"
"M-{": "{"
"M-}": "}"
"M-\": "\"
"M-|": "|"
"M-@": "@"
"M-~": "~"
"M-?": "?"
save this to e.g. c:.inputrc and put the following to your irb.bat (which is usually located in c:rubybin) straight after the @echo off line:
SET INPUTRC=C:.inputrc
Now you should be a more happier Rails dev.. At least i am. (I found this information at flip’s blog - Thanks!)