Special chars like e.g. {~ are not supported within rails console on windows

By | December 20

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!)