When you're developing an application in Rails (or Ruby), you spend lots of time in the IRB, the Interactive Ruby Shell. Usually just to test some Ruby code, start an application console or debug something going on inside the project. Yesterday, looking at a coworker screen, I saw he had his console with lots of color hints, and I thought it was pretty nice. I asked him about that and he told me he was using a special gem for that.

The gem is called wirble. It has some nice defaults and allows you to configure the colors as you wish. To use it in your consoles, just add this lines to your ~/.irbrc file: 

begin
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'wirble'
  Wirble.init
  Wirble.colorize
rescue LoadError => err
  warn "Couldn't load Wirble: #{err}"
end

Of course, you'll need to install the gem. Just issue a gem install wirble and you'll be good to go!