GHCi in colour

This page documents efforts to colourise GHCi output.

Example

Or a type error:

Output like this would be the result of running, for example:

   ghci --colour

and would appear in the console/xterm as ansi terminal coloured output.

Implementation

Using sed and ghci.conf

You can use sed to color the non-prompt output, and color the prompt with ghci.conf. This works better than piping into HsColour for me. See this blog post for details.

Using HsColour

An existing tool, HsColour, could be modified to operate interactively. In fact, HsColour is already interactive, and with a small patch added on 2006-12-14 to control ouput buffering better, this works relatively nicely:

   ghci 2>&1 | HsColour -tty

HsColour in action

There are small delays however, when lexing certain tokens, and the interaction with readline isn't ideal.

GuiHaskell

Neil Mitchell has a prototype gui haskell wrapper, based on gtk. Does this contain a reasonable ghci wrapper we could steal?

If you have an idea of how to do this nicely, add your proposal here.