[Haskell-cafe] Wishful thinking: a text editor that expands function applications into function definitions

[Claus Reinke]

One word says more than a thousand pictures: Vim <http://www.vim.org/>.
(well, okay, I'm sure Emacs will do just as well, and some of the more 
recent IDEs seem to be catching up;-) plus plugins, of course!-)

- unfolding definitions: if you really want that, it is in the domain of
    program transformation systems and refactorers (HaRe, the Haskell
    refactorer, has been mentioned - it worked on Haskell'98 sources,
    plugging into Vim or Emacs; it would really be great to have funding
    for porting that to a modern GHC/Cabal-based environment, but if 
    you're happy with Haskell'98, and have all the sources, the old HaRe 
    should still do the job once you get it to build with recent GHCs/libraries)

- looking up definitions: that is supported in various ways in Vim/Emacs
    and the like - I'll talk about some Vim examples, as that is what I use.

    - tag files (generated by running tools like 'ghc -e :ctags', hasktags,..
       over the sources) are a simple database linking identifiers to 
       definition sites. Based on these, one can jump from identifiers
       to definitions (keeping a stack of locations, so one can go back
       easily), or open split windows on the definition sites.

       See the "Moving through programs" section in Vim's help, also 
       online at: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_29.html .

    - the haskellmode plugins for Vim support documentation lookup
        (opening the haddocs for the identifier under cursor in a browser),
        and the documentation provides source links, if the docs themselves
        aren't sufficient. Useful for all those sourceless package installations.
    
    - the haskellmode plugins also support type tooltips (or, if you
        don't like tooltips, or are working in a terminal without gui, type 
        signatures can be displayed in the status line, or added to the 
        source code). This is currently based on GHCi's :browse!, though, 
        so you can only get the types of toplevel definitions that way. One 
        of the insertmode completions also displays types.

    - if you explain Haskell's import syntax to Vim, you can also search 
        in (local) imported files, using Vim's standard keyword search, for
        instance ([I).

The haskellmode plugins for Vim are currently in the process of moving 
to http://projects.haskell.org/haskellmode-vim/ . Which made me notice
that I hadn't updated the publicly available version in quite some time 
(announcement to follow when that process has settled down somewhat).

Claus