A quick shortcut to open a Ruby gem in VS Code

April 21, 2020

While working on a Ruby project, I often find myself referring to the code of various libraries when it’s easier than looking up the documentation. For this, I used to use code (bundle show GEM_NAME), but recently I’ve been getting this warning:

[DEPRECATED] use `bundle info $GEM_NAME` instead of `bundle show $GEM_NAME`

Okay, that’s fine, but bundle info returns a bunch of stuff that would confuse VS Code:

> bundle info devise
  * devise (4.7.1)
	Summary: Flexible authentication solution for Rails with Warden
	Homepage: https://github.com/plataformatec/devise
	Path: /Users/keita/.asdf/installs/ruby/2.7.0/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/gems/devise-4.7.1

Luckily there’s bundle info $GEM_NAME --path. code (bundle info devise --path) is kind of long to type out every time, though, so I decided to make an alias.

I use the Fish shell, so the code here is written for that shell. Adapt it to your shell as required. You’ll also need the VS Code terminal integration installed for this to work.

function bundlecode
  if test -e ./Gemfile
    code (bundle info $argv[1] --path)
  else
    set_color -o red
    echo "Couldn't find `Gemfile`. Try again in a directory with a `Gemfile`."
    set_color normal
  end
end

Usage:

> bundlecode devise
# VS Code opens!