[Haskell-cafe] Ease of Haskell development on OS X?

[Jason Dusek]

2009/03/20 Mark Spezzano <mark.spezzano at chariot.net.au>:
> Question: Does the iMac have good support for Haskell
> development?

  Yes. I generally use the Mac binary of GHC and then install C
  libs with MacPorts.

> Question: What environment setups do people commonly use (e.g.
> Eclipse Xcode etc)?

  I use screen and vim. In particular, I use MacVim, which
  provides both a vim console application and a Mac native GUI.

> Question: Are there any caveats I should be aware of before
> changing systems (i.e. unpleasant surprises).

  Mac laptops get very warm.

  You'll have a powerful urge to buy an iPhone and pimp Macs to
  your friends.

  There is really no 'home' or 'end' key. To move back and forth
  on a line in the Terminal application, use fn-shift-leftarrow
  and fn-shift-rightarrow (annoyed me for days). To move back
  and forth on a line in grapical application -- for example,
  the search bar in Firefox -- use cmd-leftarrow and
  cmd-rightarrow.

  MacPorts is not as robust as comparable systems on other
  operating systems: Gentoo's Portage and FreeBSD's Ports. It
  corrupts its registry and terrible things happen. The remedy
  is usually a total reinstall of all packages. This has
  happened to me only once on one Mac in a year and a half of
  administering several Macs; but it's not something I've ever
  dealt with on other source-based systems.

--
Jason Dusek