[Haskell-cafe] IDE?

[Jules Bean]

peterv wrote:
> I just tried the Haskell Mode using xemacs, adjust my init.el file, loaded
> my haskell file, and got great syntax highlighting! So far so good.
> 
> But people, emacs is sooooo weird for a Windows user... 


Well you're certainly quite right to observe that emacs keys are rather 
different from the standard windows keys. Of course many of the emacs 
keybindings were put into place long before the mac-windows key 
standards started to emerge.

Then there is the different region behaviour (a region is not quite a 
selection, etc etc).

You can choose to try to rebind these various things closer to windows 
defaults, and some projects out there try to do this for. However to be 
honest I'm not convinced this is the right way to go, because to really 
use the power of emacs, you want to use various of the powerful packages 
('plugins') that people have written, and they probably have keybindings 
which "behave like" the standard ones.

But it is actually worth spending some time working out if it's the 
right editor for you; because there are things about it which blow the 
socks of most other packages.

To pick a couple of examples at random: having a kill-ring which stores 
your last 60 copies/cuts is so much more powerful than merely having a 
clipboard, and it really changes the way you can work; the amazing 
'paredit-mode' which keeps your code syntactically correct at all times 
by automatically balancing brackets and "", and gives you high-level 
syntactical commands to move or delete chunks of syntactically 
wellformed code makes code entry + modification faster and safer.

Jules