Use non-ASCII characters on IRB and Rails consoles with RVM and Mac OS X

If you are using RVM on a Mac and cannot enter 8+ bit characters on an IRB or Rails console, you are missing the readline package. You will need to re-install your Ruby to fix this:

rvm remove ree
rvm package install readline
rvm install ree --with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr
rvm default ree

Substitute ree with the name if your Ruby distribution.

This note was contributed by Matthias Marschall from the Agile Web Development & Operations Show archive.org snapshot blog.