Quick tip: Loading a plain IRB session with no syntax highlighting or multiline editing in Ruby 2.7+

Alex Peattie

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04 Jun, 2020

1 minute read

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One of the nice additions in Ruby 2.7 is that IRB by default gets pry-inspired syntax highlighting and multiline editing by default.

I've found sometimes though that this can cause IRB to run slower, especially when performing operations like pasting a large amount of data from the clipboard.

Fortunately, it’s easy to run an “old-fashioned” IRB session, just append the --nocolorize and --nomultiline options:

irb --nocolorize --nomultiline

And pasting becomes snappy once again: