interact

Interact

Another interaction library for Ruby, with an interesting twist: the user can go back in time to re-answer questions.

Copyright 2011, Alex Suraci. Licensed under the MIT license, please see the LICENSE file. All rights reserved.

Basic Usage

require "rubygems"
require "interact"

class MyInteractiveClass
  include Interactive

  def run
    first = ask "Some question?"
    second = ask "Boolean default?", :default => true
    third = ask "Stringy default?", :default => "foo"

    fourth = ask "Multiple choice?", :choices => ["foo", "bar", "fizz"]

    some_mutation = []

    fifth = ask "Multiple choice, indexed list?",
      :choices => ["foo", "bar", "fizz"],
      :indexed => true

    some_mutation << fifth

    finalize

    sixth = ask "Password", :echo => "*", :forget => true

    p [first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth]
  end
end

MyInteractiveClass.new.run

After running this, the user will be prompted with each question one-by-one. Interact supports basic editing features such as going to the start/end, editing in the middle of the text, backspace, forward delete, and backwards-kill-word.

In addition, the user can hit the up arrow to go "back in time" and re-answer questins.

Make sure you call finalize after doing any mutation performed based on user input; this will prevent them from rewinding to before this took place. Or you can just disable rewinding if it's too complicated (see below).

Anyway, here's an example session:

Some question?: hello<enter>
Boolean default? [Yn]: <up>
Some question? ["hello"]: trying again<enter>
Boolean default? [Yn]: n<enter>
Stringy default? ["foo"]: <up>
Boolean default? [yN]: y<enter>
Stringy default? ["foo"]: <enter>
Multiple choice? ("foo", "bar", "fizz"): f<enter>
Please disambiguate: foo or fizz?
Multiple choice? ("foo", "bar", "fizz"): fo<enter>
1: foo
2: bar
3: fizz
Multiple choice, indexed list?: 2<enter>
Password: ******<enter>
["trying again", true, "foo", "foo", "bar", "secret"]

Note that the user's previous answers become the new defaults for the question if they rewind.

Disabling Rewinding

Interact provides a nifty user-friendly "rewinding" feature, which allows the user to go back in time and re-answer a question. If you don't want this feature, simply call disable_rewind in your class. You can re-enable it with enable_rewind in subclasses.

class NoRewind
  include Interactive
  disable_rewind

  def run
    res = ask "Is there no return?", :default => true

    if res == rewind_enabled?
      puts "You're right!"
    else
      puts "Nope! It's disabled."
    end
  end
end

NoRewind.new.run