[Haskell-cafe] Haskell, stack and the Atom editor

[Thomas Koster]

Benjamin,

On 9 April 2016 at 17:03, Thomas Koster <tkoster at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to switch to the Atom editor for my Haskell development. I have tried
> several times over the last few years and given up each time because hardly
> anything works.
>
> I can't stand Emacs so don't bother suggesting it.

On 9 April 2016 at 19:57, Benjamin Edwards <edwards.benj at gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess you'll be happy to get all this stuff working on atom yourself like
> the good folks working on emacs have.

No. Not happy at all.

I spent only minutes setting up Geany for Haskell development.
Basically, bind some ghc-mod commands and stack commands to hotkeys.
Sure, it doesn't do much, but the basics work beautifully for small
projects. This is my benchmark.

Because that was all it took to get Geany to build my projects, I took
the same approach with Atom. But I have wasted hours on Atom so far
and didn't get further than syntax highlighting. So while I admit this
was clearly the wrong approach, I am still displeased with Atom right
now.

But I wasted days once trying to learn Emacs. Sorry, I just don't have
the time or brain-space to attempt Emacs again. Certainly, the
haskell-mode team are to be congratulated for what is probably the
most mature and feature-rich Haskell IDE offering we have at this
time. I just find it tragic that it targets Emacs.

If I can't make Atom work for me, I will drop it just as fast as I
dropped Emacs. Spacemacs was suggested to me off-list; if it addresses
my complaints about Emacs, I might give it a chance. But Atom is the
topic of this thread, so lest this thread descend into a text editor
flame war, I suggest we stop talking about Emacs (or Vim, or Eclipse,
or anything else).

--
Thomas Koster