where is Leksah heading?

[Dean Thompson]

During a frustrating effort to get all the pieces of Emacs haskell-mode working, and to learn how to use it effectively, I saw some glowing remarks here and there about Leksah. It is a compelling thesis -- let's build a real IDE for Haskell, in Haskell!

I see a lot of hard work in the GitHub commit history, mostly by Hamish Mackenzie, but recently also by jaccokrijnen.

But when I start trying to use Leksah, the first thing I discover is that the user guide hasn't been updated in 5 years! And there's not much else. The wiki just has a little "getting started" information. So I start trying to feel my way through the UI without documentation. It is quite difficult! Lots of things feel mysterious to me.

Just as one example: I hunt around for a way to jump to a definition, and finally stumble on holding down <control> and hovering over an identifier. That underlines the identifier in a way that seems clickable. But usually when I click, nothing happens. Although for one particular identifier in my code it does work, so I know I'm not entirely on the wrong track.

Where is this trying to go? Don't get me wrong -- I love the thesis, and I greatly appreciate the volunteer effort. I just don't yet understand the goals or the roadmap. For example:

• Where is Leksah believed to stand right now? Is it expected to be at a point where lots of Haskell programmers could pick it up and use it?
• What next big milestone is the project trying to hit? For example, stability? Feature completeness? Usability? Polish?

Dean

[guthrie]

Unfortunately, I think that no reply for 1.5 years gives the answer...

I am surprised at the "no IDE needed" approach for what seems like most of the Haskell community. The editor and command window approach seems so 1970's to me (yes, been there!), and today's students take the lack of such modern environments as a sign of a legacy anachronism language.

[Dean Thompson]

:-) yeah

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 3:08 PM, guthrie <grgu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Unfortunately, I think that no reply for 1.5 years gives the answer...

I am surprised at the "no IDE needed" approach for what seems like most of the Haskell community. The editor and command window approach seems so 1970's to me (yes, been there!), and today's students take the lack of such modern environments as a sign of a legacy anachronism language.

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[Jeremy Huffman]

I felt the same way three years ago but Spacemacs + intero is awesome. I actually prefer it now. No IDE has a text editing experience that comes close and I get more productivity from those but would still like a good IDE for refactoring.

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 5:15 PM Dean Thompson <deansher...@gmail.com> wrote:

:-) yeah

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 3:08 PM, guthrie <grgu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Unfortunately, I think that no reply for 1.5 years gives the answer...

I am surprised at the "no IDE needed" approach for what seems like most of the Haskell community. The editor and command window approach seems so 1970's to me (yes, been there!), and today's students take the lack of such modern environments as a sign of a legacy anachronism language.

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[guthrie]

Thanks; nice. But what about us Vi folks!  ☺

[Jeremy Huffman]

> Thanks; nice. But what about us Vi folks! 

That's the point of Spacemacs. Evil (VIM emulator) mode bindings for everything. 

http://spacemacs.org/

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 10:13 PM, guthrie <grgu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks; nice. But what about us Vi folks!  ☺

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[Hamish Mackenzie]

Sorry, I am not sure how I missed this.  It is so long ago that perhaps I saw the email and forgot to reply.

> Just as one example: I hunt around for a way to jump to a definition, and finally stumble on holding down <control> and hovering over an identifier. That underlines the identifier in a way that seems clickable. But usually when I click, nothing happens. Although for one particular identifier in my code it does work, so I know I'm not entirely on the wrong track.

It only works if the identifier is top level and in a package that was successfully indexed.  Even then Leksah only looks it up based on the name (so if there are two with the same name it does not know which and will list them instead and you can choose the one to jump to).

> Where is this trying to go?

I think Leksah contributions are mostly guided by what makes life easier.  Because we are dog fooding it is usually easy to find something to work on next.  Making it easier to contribute to Leksah is always a high priority since more contributors definitely makes things easier.

On that note, the build instructions have just been revamped:

https://github.com/leksah/leksah#installation

Jacco wrote an awesome guide to help people get up to speed:

https://github.com/leksah/leksah/blob/master/Contributing.md

Hopefully making it easier than ever to get started contributing.  Hop on #leksah or log a github issue if you need help with anything or would like to contribute.

Here are some of the things I will be working on when I have time:

_Short Term Stuff_

1) Nix support.  I have been using nix to help on reflex-platform.  Although Leksah can work with nix (you can run it in a nix-shell) it would be nice to be able to have leksah launch the nix-shells so that you don't have to exit Leksah to switch between nix-shells.  I also think nix will be a great way for a lot of people to install Leksah.

2) Using Travis to build the OS X binaries in the same way AppVayor is now building the Windows ones.

https://ci.appveyor.com/project/hamishmack/leksah/build/artifacts

3) Bug fixes.

_Really Long Term Stuff_

1) I would like to add a reflex/reflex-dom based UI.

On Sat, 11 Feb 2017 at 00:44 Jeremy Huffman <jer...@jeremyhuffman.com> wrote:

> Thanks; nice. But what about us Vi folks! 

That's the point of Spacemacs. Evil (VIM emulator) mode bindings for everything. 

http://spacemacs.org/

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 10:13 PM, guthrie <grgu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks; nice. But what about us Vi folks!  ☺

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