[Haskell-cafe] IDE?

[Taylor Venable]

Michael T. Richter wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-17-06 at 22:37 +0100, David House wrote:
>>  > Well, part 1 would be being *graphical*. I really have no time for ugly 
>>  > cryptic ASCII art "graphical" UIs... I just like being able to *see* 
>>  > what's happening. Is that too much to ask?
>>
>> Did you read the rest of my email? For every feature you cited I gave links and
>> screenshots to the Emacs equivalents, none of which (AFAIK -- I don't actually
>> use them all) use ASCII art.
> 
> Got a file chooser that's actually a GUI that has the look and feel of 
> every other GUI file chooser in existence?  Because what I see in emacs 
> now that I've got the X version working (aside from horrible, ugly, 
> unreadable fonts -- again the Notepad of the GNOME world is kicking ass 
> and taking names here!) is a half-assed GUI wrapped around a plain 
> text-dominated interface.  Kind of what you'd expect from people who 
> think that GUIs are a waste of time and put one in just to say "we've 
> got a GUI -- what are you talking about?"

No need to get nasty.  One of the reasons that Emacs' GUI is lacking 
compared to that of (many) other programs is the fact that 99.9% of the 
underlying program code and function is exactly the same no matter what 
widget toolkit (or even when no widget-toolkit, i.e. the command-line) 
gets used.  Furthermore, Emacs never does exactly what you want right 
out of the box.  Most Emacs users have been tweaking their config files 
for years and are still constantly finding things to add or adjust.  I 
personally find the default-configured Emacs a terrible pain to use. 
And lastly, it's not for everyone, and I think that for every programmer 
who's happy with a pretty editor that supports the most basic 
functionality, there's another programmer who prefers the somewhat ugly 
but more flexible editor.

I find Stefan Monnier's haskell-mode a fine tool for writing Haskell 
code in Emacs.  Do also note that Stefan is one of the lead developers 
on GNU Emacs, which is testament to how good this mode is.

Best regards.

-- 
Taylor Venable
taylor at metasyntax.net
http://www.metasyntax.net/