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Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell

commercialhaskell.github.io

11–20 of 75 posts

Re: Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell

#11
post #6

Looks like I've got a choice to make (all on NixOS): + Stick with NeoVim and hope one of the Intero ports to that editor takes off (as I understand it there are a couple right now) + Switch to Emacs+Evil+Intero. I've never used Emacs before (even with Evil) so it would be a little work. If someone more up-to-date on the situation has advice that would be awesome:)

I'm a emacs convert from vim (big reason is because module support is just leagues ahead of vim, Vundle, Pathogen, or anything else don't come close to emacs package management). A huge reason why I stuck with it is because evil. evil is very mature and is incredibly close to vim, some say it's a better vim than vim.

I tried a lot of "vi modes" in several IDEs but none of them cut it, you can map anything to evil and you can, of course, map commands to different states. Something I found very usefil is that you can even set states for different buffers, for example, for magit buffers (another amazing emacs module and a very good reason to use emacs) I default those to "insert" mode.

I haven't used Intero myself, but I've yet to find any kind of conflict between evil or any other module.

Re: Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell

#12
post #5

I've been waiting for this release before finally trying to switch from Vim (MacVim) to Spacemacs. Anybody have any tips for somebody who's never really used Emacs?

I'm not using Spacemacs, but rather Evil mode in Emacs. I think the biggest thing I would caution is to expect small things to be different. For example underscores are word boundaries in Emacs. File selection is different. Some modes do not have vi key bindings set up by default. Escape doesn't always work to abort (you need to get used to pressing ctl-g). Omni complete is absent and completion in Emacs works quite differently. Searching through files and sorting through compilation errors works quite differently. I think that's most of the issues I've run into.

It took me about a month to get everything set up the way I wanted it and to get used to it. With Spacemacs, I imagine that things will generally be set up, but that it will take longer to get used to because it is pretty opinionated about things like leader keys. Right now my set up is good enough that if I accidentally run vim instead of emacs, it takes me about 15-20 minutes before I realise it (normally when I try to update an org mode file ;-) ).

My biggest advice is to take the transition slowly. Use Emacs/Spacemacs until you get annoyed with it and then put it away for a while. Eventually you will start to get used to Emacs-isms (like ctl-g) and Vim will start to annoy you. At that point cut over entirely.

One thing that's really annoying is that when you are modifying your .emacs/init.d file, it's easy to get it into a bad state. At that point Evil and also probably your theme won't be set up properly. So you have to fix everything using emacs keystrokes. I used emacs for 20 years before I switched to vim and even still it seems I am no longer able to use vanilla emacs ;-)

One you get it set up and are used to it, though, it works surprisingly well. For me the absolute biggest advantage to emacs is Org mode and I basically can't give it up now. Good luck on your switch!

Re: Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell

#14
post #10
post #6

Looks like I've got a choice to make (all on NixOS): + Stick with NeoVim and hope one of the Intero ports to that editor takes off (as I understand it there are a couple right now) + Switch to Emacs+Evil+Intero. I've never used Emacs before (even with Evil) so it would be a little work. If someone more up-to-date on the situation has advice that would be awesome:)

I don't know NixOS, but this blog post and lecture might help you give emacs a fair trial: http://blog.aaronbieber.com/2015/05/24/from-vim-to-emacs-in-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWD1Fpdd4Pc One of my vim-using coworkers found it. He, along with another colleague, have since found emacs compelling enough to use as their main text editor.

Thanks, this is encouraging.

Re: Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell

#15
post #11
post #6

Looks like I've got a choice to make (all on NixOS): + Stick with NeoVim and hope one of the Intero ports to that editor takes off (as I understand it there are a couple right now) + Switch to Emacs+Evil+Intero. I've never used Emacs before (even with Evil) so it would be a little work. If someone more up-to-date on the situation has advice that would be awesome:)

I'm a emacs convert from vim (big reason is because module support is just leagues ahead of vim, Vundle, Pathogen, or anything else don't come close to emacs package management). A huge reason why I stuck with it is because evil. evil is very mature and is incredibly close to vim, some say it's a better vim than vim. I tried a lot of "vi modes" in several IDEs but none of them cut it, you can map anything to evil and…

Uh oh, this is pretty convincing=)

Re: Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell

#16
post #11
post #6

Looks like I've got a choice to make (all on NixOS): + Stick with NeoVim and hope one of the Intero ports to that editor takes off (as I understand it there are a couple right now) + Switch to Emacs+Evil+Intero. I've never used Emacs before (even with Evil) so it would be a little work. If someone more up-to-date on the situation has advice that would be awesome:)

I'm a emacs convert from vim (big reason is because module support is just leagues ahead of vim, Vundle, Pathogen, or anything else don't come close to emacs package management). A huge reason why I stuck with it is because evil. evil is very mature and is incredibly close to vim, some say it's a better vim than vim. I tried a lot of "vi modes" in several IDEs but none of them cut it, you can map anything to evil and…

Evil seems to get some things wrong or weird. If I use the mouse, then using . to repeat last edit doesn't work. I've also had issues using macros sometime.

It also seems to have severe performance issues. Maybe it's Emacs, or rust-mode. But, say, running a macro 1000 times on a 10K line file is far slower than using vim.

But overall it's pretty great. I have the feeling it's easier to configure, once I get familiar with Emacs/elisp.

Re: Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell

#18
I wish I could get a similar utility for Python and Javascript as this seems to show off some cool FP auto complete.

I'm basically looking for a way to remove my dependency on my 5-7 IDEs and I don't know how. I wish someone could show me a very good, simple, alternative to all of them. I work in C, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, and C# and I'd like to be able to use a single IDE solution for all of them. Sadly I cant find anything with good auto completion and nice features (like things offered by Eclipse).

This has some really promising features, I've got to say I'm amazed.

Re: Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell

#20

How sad is it that people invest this amount of effort into things that essentially nobody will use?

Not sad at all.

I confess I have similar thoughts when I look at things that are getting reinvented all over the place. I have come to feel this is actually a counterproductive thought. Exploring in obscure tools is the definition of tinkering exploration. Which is often a big driver in pushing progress. (Same for reinvention.)

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