I have a few ideas I'd like to see the Gem tool. Please correct me if they don't already exist!
options, like the gem path variable, but to display, say 10 at a time with gem list (or an arbitrary number, or even a regex-ish thing...)
Something similar to ri or other command line tools that allow for pagination.
Nothing is more obnoxious than having to scroll back up a long list of gems.
Next dumb idea of mine:
Aliases.
Aliasing a gem name or a group of gems.
With the ability to essentially create your own grouping of gems.
So, say I want to create 'railsgems' as a group alias for all the gems I use with Rails...
something like this:
gem alias -g ActiveRecord RMagick ActionPack
so gem alias wold allow creation of an alias, to prevent the need to always type a long version number (yes I'm lazy)
but also have a -g or --g flag for group aliasing, followed by argument list of gem names.
With indexing, there could easily be automatic aliases for first character.
so
gem list a
would not have to search the gems, just quickly list all of the a* named gems
gem list r would list all the r* gems without searching every time.
But one step further, let's also make requiring gems, particularly groups of gems easier.
require 'rubygems'
require 'my_gem_group'
Or even:
require 'rubygems:my_gem_group'
or something like that!
Granted, gem aliases might make dependencies and deployment more fragile in a sense, but no more than other required libraries in software. So, there is one last idea to go with this group alias require approach...
Auto generate (with optional on or off flag or gem env variable) RDOC that names the alias contents.
I suppose internally gem aliases should essentially need to be either a simple alias_name_here.rb file generated that requires all the gems included in the alias.
This step might make (re)distribution a little easier.
Perhaps an additional Rake task included to add gems in the requires or alias requires when those gems are not already on a system.