You can make your command line interface look a little better than just a bungle of white on black (or however you or your users set your terminal). In my on-going development of a few little open source projects, all of them with CLIs, I abstracted this cute addition to the Ruby snippets junkyard and decided to air it.

With it, you can wrap any string with ANSI codes like this:

MicroTest has had a few tweaks, making it more brief and efficient at what it does. Also, I added a setup and teardown interface which can be used. For example, I removed the use of ObjectSpace and squeezed a few percent of performance just from that. On my 1.83GHz, the 6 tests of the self test now consistently take around 500 microseconds (or 0.0005 seconds). Pretty nippy.

My little library (the smallest ever?) for bootstrapping and lightning-fast testing has just become smaller. I changed the interface a little: now everything is dependent on method name! So you still have two tests, one which expects true and the other false, and which one is determined by using ‘def should_’ or ‘def should_not_’. Oh happy days!

What is the fastest way to dynamically define a method? define_method? class_eval? instance_eval? With strings or procs? Maybe we can pull out some arcane magic and use instance_method and bind (depending on what we want to do).