lazy_names gem, how much time do you spend in console?

The idea behind the gem is to shorten long constant names that often appear as a project grows. Your services, models, and controllers get buried under deep namespaces, and typing them repeatedly becomes tedious. I'm a lazy developer, and I believe many of us are too.

I’m happy to share the lazy_names gem! This gem allows you to define a config file that maps long, namespaced constants to something simpler and more intuitive:

'Models::Users::CreditCard': 'UserCard'

I spend a lot of time in the console, which is why I originally wrote this gem. Here’s a quick look at my most frequently run commands from my Zsh history:

$: history | awk '{$1=""; print $0}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
 647  gs
 135  rc # rails console
 135  ls
 134  gd
 ...

Do you use the Ruby console much while developing? I personally like to check my code directly in the console — calling methods to inspect return values — especially in the early development stage before tests are written. Sometimes, I need to drop records from the database or build some structs on the fly.

I also spend a lot of time in a remote Rails console via kubectl exec -ti $1 -- bundle exec rails c. However, I’m unsure whether shipping this gem to a production environment is the right move. I keep thinking about it in the background, as I often miss its functionality when working remotely.

Future Plans:

1. I’m considering adding custom shorteners to be defined by gem user. So it can convert class/constants by some user function, that can be configured outside of the gem. I think of modifying config file structure. So it will have only frequent constants list. And custom shortener will build lazy versions on console initialize.
2. I might take it a step further—feeding the gem a history file from Pry/IRB so it can automatically generate a ready-to-use config file based on your recent commands.