Tag Archives: gems

Psych 4.0 is broken

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That’s what I hear, anyway, that Psych 4.0 quit working.

The toolchain I’ve constructed to publish my podcast quit working after a recent upgrade I’ve been trying to get it working.

Unfortunately, while I’ve been using ruby since 2001, I’ve never had to figure out how rubygems work. I program for a hobby. It’s not my day job. For what I do, I’ve always been able to use the most recent version. I don’t even know how to use Bundler. (As a first step, I should try it in a single script.)

I did figure out that I could uninstall 4.0, but I might need something that depends on it. So I need to learn how to specify a particular version in my own scripts.




Useful gems, 2020 edition

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Since the gem ecosystem keeps changing, and since I don’t write new programs very often, here’s a list of my favorite gems for developing command-line interface tools.

Option parsing gem: slop. (Since micro-optparse looks moribund; see here.) But (looking at programs I’ve written) I also seem to like trollop, a/k/a optimist. But I also like the fine-grained control of OptionParser.

Debugging output (not the same as logging): pastel

Invoking system functions gem: tty-command. (See also tty-config and tty-file.) But sadly, tty-command (or how I’ve used it) gets me warnings that bellyache about the 2.7 named argument splat problem.

Wrapper for ImageMagick: About a decade ago, I couldn’t get RMagick (rubymagick?) to compile and I’ve never gotten around to checking back. For awhile I used %x<convert ...> or whatever, but now, if I’m working with images, I’ve sometimes found mini-magick helpful.

Proper Capitalization of Text Strings That Are Titles: titleize.

Parsing Biblical references (e.g., Romans 8:39 and Genesis 12:1-4): pericope.

Plus Kramdown and HAML and SASS (which is no longer written in Ruby).