If you're using Emacs 24 and haven't configured MELPA yet, you're missing out on thousands of community-maintained packages. MELPA (Milkypostman's Emacs Lisp Package Archive) is the largest and most active Emacs package repository, offering bleeding-edge packages that are updated daily from their source repositories.
Tmux is a powerful terminal multiplexer that lets you run multiple terminal sessions within a single window. However, when using tmux with macOS Terminal.app, you’ll encounter two common frustrations: colors don’t display properly, and you can’t use your terminal’s native scroll functionality. Instead, tmux captures scrolling and requires you to enter “copy mode” just to view previous output.
If you work with multiple terminal tabs or windows—especially in iTerm or Terminal.app—you've probably noticed that each session maintains its own isolated command history. This becomes frustrating when you run a command in one tab and want to recall it in another. By default, bash only saves history when a session closes, and each session can overwrite the others' history.
I spend most of my time working with IRB (Interactive Ruby) or Rails console. Over time, I've settled on a configuration that provides essential features like persistent command history, autocompletion, and Rails-specific logging. These improvements make the Ruby REPL much more productive for daily development work.
IRB (Interactive Ruby) is Ruby's built-in REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) – an interactive shell for experimenting with Ruby code. It's invaluable for testing code snippets, debugging, and exploring APIs. When working with Rails, the Rails console is essentially IRB with your application's environment loaded.