#Best haskell ide code

There are a few more neat features of Haskell-mode, like support for automatic unit testing or Hoogle integration, but I haven’t used them. Haskell mode offers great indentation management: it has four of possible ‘indentation policies’ and you can cycle between them using TAB key. I’m not an Emacs hacker and I don’t have idea why they didn’t work out of the box, though I tried to change keyboard shortcuts of the non-working commands hoping that they will work. However, I wasn’t able to get some of the features running.

#Best haskell ide code

It gives you nice code highlighting (IMO better than EclipseFP and Leksah), provides some basic code templates (guard insertion, where keyword and few more), possibility of starting a Haskell interpreter and interacting with it, e.g. executing code from the editor or automatic insertion of type annotations. There are two extensions that enhance Haskell editing in Emacs: Haskell mode and ghc-mod. They enhance the basic features of the editor with anything you can possibly imagine, including reading and sending email. Still, Emacs could be a whole lot better if someone made a bold step to redesign its prehistoric shortcuts to something more ergonomic and adjusted to keyboards of today ( Emacs shortcuts were designed with different keyboards in mind).Īnother distinguishing feature of Emacs is the variety of different plugins (called ‘extensions’). The problem is that using a mouse is slower than even the most crazy key combinations (my favourite is C-M-Space-u - that’s four keys at once). Graphical editors usually don’t have that many shortcuts and even if they do they discourage us from using them since everything can be selected from the menu. How come? Thanks to the keyboard shortcuts, but not because they are good, but simply because they exist. That said, editing code in Emacs can be faster than in graphical text editor. OK, mnemonics are nice, but look where these keys are on the keyboard! That’s completely ridiculous, especially that most of us doesn’t care about mnemonics because we type without looking at the keyboard anyway. Moving the cursor is even more insane: C-f / C-b to move it left and right (f denotes forward, b denotes backward), while C-p / C-n moves it to previous and next line respectively. Unfortunately there’s a lot of examples: C-x C-s is required to save a file and nobody is going to convince me that this is better than simply C-s (this is one of the basic commands, you do it once every few minutes). The more objective problem with shortcuts is the fact that they are overcomplicated and extremely hard to type. That’s very subjective matter and after couple of weeks with Emacs these become quite intuitive. C-w means pressing Ctrl and ‘w’ simultaneously, C-M-q means Ctrl+Alt+q. Prepare to use C-w / C-y (( In Emacs convention C denotes Ctrl key, M denotes Alt key. Forget about Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V to copy-paste. First of all they are not intuitive for people that are used only to modern GUIs. It is (un)famous for its keyboard shortcuts and I must say that this fame is well-deserved. I decided that it will be best to learn it and see for myself if it’s really that good.Įmacs has extremely steep learning curve. I stayed away from it for years, but when I started with Haskell and Lisp I realised that a lot of people regard Emacs as the best editor for these languages. Emacs is a text-based (i.e. no GUI i.e. not WYSIWYG) text-editor for *nix systems. We’ll begin with Emacs.īefore I go into details of developing Haskell using Emacs let me write about Emacs itself. I wanted to give an overview of these three, but this turned out to be a lot of writing so I decided to split this up into three separate posts, each describing one IDE. I’ve been working with Haskell for about 4 months now and I already have a bit of experience with three Haskell development environments: Emacs, EclipseFP and Leksah.

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