[Haskell-cafe] Re: Editors for Haskell

[Jeremy O'Donoghue]

Hi Walt,

> I'm using Haskell (GHC and Hugs) on several different platforms.
> Windows, OS X and Linux systems.

Assuming that you want your students to be able to use any of the
above platforms, the only options I know of which work well on all of
the platforms are Emacsen, Vim, hIDE, Eclipse and JEdit.

> I'd like to have an IDE that works well for medium to large size
> projects. I know of Eclipse and hIDE.
> Vim works fine but I'd like more. hiDE seems to be "in process."

Much as I love Emacs, I can possibly imagine that you'd prefer to
spend the course teaching Haskell, rather than how to use your editor.

I personally found Eclipse very difficult to get on with, although YMMV.

Although I don't use it much any more, I found JEdit to be very
straightforward to use (very good menu-based GUI, plenty of features,
syntax highlighting for most languages any sane person could want, and
generally very easy to pick up). It's very underrated IMHO.

The main reason I switched is that it does slow down with lots (>20,
some very large) of files open. Emacs is better with very large
projects (I mean > 10,000 files here), which is why I use it. I'd
recommend it as a very good editor / simple IDE for people who don't
want to spend their life learning to use their editor...

HTH

Regards
Jeremy