[Haskell-cafe] IDE?

[David House]

Andrew Coppin writes:
 > >  > Personally, I really hate text-mode editors. (I won't even go into how
 > >  > many times I've had to reboot Linux just to get *out* of Vi!)
 > >
 > > 'Z Z' is the command to quit vi, right?
 > >   
 > 
 > Sometimes. Sometimes it just types "zz" in the document. It depends on 
 > the alignment of the planets.

Ah, then you're in the wrong mode. Press ESC first.

 > It's a text-mode editor.

With graphical support.

 >  quod erat demonstrandum.

Please don't be so quick to jump to conclusions like that.

 > Since it only operates in text-mode, it cannot possibly provide things 
 > like clickable fold points,

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/CategoryOutline

I'm not sure any of those supply _clickable_ points, but there's no reason in
principle it couldn't be done. Emacs users just feel that using the keyboard is
quicker.

 > or a side-bar containing a bunch of icons representing the objects in the
 > current file,

Speedbar:

http://cedet.sourceforge.net/speedbar.shtml
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SpeedBar
http://cedet.sourceforge.net/speedbar-multi-2.jpg -- screenshot
http://jdee.sunsite.dk/jdedoc/html/jde-ug/images/speedbar1.gif -- screenshot

Not sure about integration with haskell-mode, but there's no reason this
couldn't be done in Emacs.

 > or a spell checker,

Flyspell:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/FlySpell
http://prog.vub.ac.be/~cderoove/geekery/emacslatex/flyspell_menu.png -- screenshot

 > or an interactive debugger,

As previously mentioned, debugging in Haskell hasn't really reached maturity
yet, but there's an Emacs interface to gdb:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/GdbMode
http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob/gdb-ui.png -- screenshot

 > or any of those other features that require a GUI. 

Perhaps you ought to revise your opinions on what constitutes a GUI.

(By the way, all those screenshots above show Emacs with horrible fonts that
haven't been anti-aliased. By checking out the unicode-2 branch of Emacs, which
will be merged into the trunk before Emacs 23, you can easily get XFT support. I
wouldn't live without it.)

-- 
-David House, dmhouse at gmail.com