Console is a helper class for displaying super-ASCII strings on the console. Console is needed when you want to mix multi-column (e.g. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters) and single-column (e.g. ASCII) characters and know how much horizontal realestate the result takes on the screen. This is generally necessary when you want to have internationalization support in a console program. The Console gem currently provides these methods: - Console.display_width: calculates the display width of a string - Console.display_slice: returns a substring according to display offset and display width parameters. If you require 'console', you will get just those methods. If you require 'console/string', you will get String#display_width and String#display_slice methods directly on all strings.