Matchit.vim is great too, but you have to position your cursor on one of the block delimiting keywords (e.g. class, module, def, if, do or end) to make `v%` do what you want. The nice thing about text-objects is that the target area where you can trigger them to achieve the desired effect is much larger.
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Nifty, but this seems like plugin overkill.
I just use matchit (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=39) and then I can do v% to visually select everything to the end of a block.
Matchit.vim is great too, but you have to position your cursor on one of the block delimiting keywords (e.g. class, module, def, if, do or end) to make `v%` do what you want. The nice thing about text-objects is that the target area where you can trigger them to achieve the desired effect is much larger.
plus you get the ability to increase and decrease the block scope with ir / ar
Incidentally, the rubyblock text-object uses matchit under the hood.