Google is the de-facto rubygem search engine. If you don't know the real name of the gem, you Google for functionality or common name ([ruby prawn gem]), find a blog post, copy/paste the line that starts with "gem install" (gem install prawn), and then go back to whatever you were doing.

http://gemcutter.org and the search feature of the website might reduce the need of googling for rubygems.

Read the source: http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/lib/

rubygems and easy_install/.egg packages are more or less the same thing.

Eh, easy_install has been a sort of sticking point with me for a while. One of those things that makes me shake my fist at the sky and leaves me a bit baffled that I seem to be the only one pulling his hair out.

So far as I can tell there is no way for easy_install to do anything but install packages. I see an "upgrade" command but it seems to only work if I specify the package name, and I don't see any way to list what version of what is installed. I also don't see any way to remove packages.

In short, this means easy_install turns my system into a mystery grab bag of packages that I can't remove without fishing around in site-packages.

Unless of course I'm missing something, but if I'm missing something it certainly isn't obvious.