Speed up your daily work with Elixir console tricks

The article lists IEx tricks meant to make daily Elixir work smoother. It points to built-in help, autocomplete, shell history, multiline input, previous results, faster recompilation, and a local .iex.exs file for imports, aliases, variables, and IEx configuration.

Reading notes

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• Use h in IEx to check documentation for built-in modules instead of switching to a browser.
• iex -S mix gives access to project modules and their docs, including @doc and @moduledoc.
• Tab completion helps with module and function names, and it only shows public functions.
• Shell history can be enabled with iex --erl "-kernel shell_history enabled" or by setting ERL_AFLAGS.
• IEx supports multiline pasting and can reuse the previous result with v() when a pasted expression starts with a binary operator.
• Previous results can be reused for debugging or for computations that are expensive to run again.
• recompile lets you test code changes without restarting the console.
• A local .iex.exs can import modules, add aliases, set variables, and configure IEx on startup.