Imagine: you open a rails console and type User.limit(100). The output shows your database call, then… ACTIVE RECORD GUT PUNCH!!! Your screen is overrun with an inscrutable wall of text.
I hated it. I had some coping mechanisms, but they were cumbersome. For example, the map-and-print:
puts User.all.map { |u| "#{u.id}, #{u.email}, #{u.bio}" }.join("\n"); 0 This still sucked. Tons of typing, mid-line typos, forgetting to start with ‘puts’, accidentally returning the whole array - and the output was better but still not great.
UPDATE: I made a gem! Just add gem "marco-polo" to your gemfile to see your app name and environment in your console prompt.
I hate when I have a bunch of consoles open and I don’t know which one is local, which is staging, and which is production. I could potentially do a lot of damage by using the wrong one. I find myself typing Rails.env over and over, to figure out which environment I’m in.