EclipseFP: integrating stylish-haskell

Stylish-haskell is a new code formatter for Haskell, and people have asked for it to be integrated in EclipseFP. This will be part of the 2.3.1 release.

You install stylish-haskell and set its path as with any helper executable (if it's your path you don't even need to specify the path in EclipseFP). Then there's a preference page to set preferences for all projects in your workspace, and a property page on each project if you want project-specific settings:

Then it's only a matter of right-clicking on the source, and choose Source-> Format. Or of course Ctrl+Shift+F which is the standard formatting shortcut in Eclipse. EclipseFP handles writing the YAML configuration file for you!

Don't know yet when EclipseFP 2.3.1 will be released, pretty soon I think!

Command history in EclipseFP GHCi console

It seems to be a very basic functionality, but when you launch a GHCi session in EclipseFP, you don't have command history. You see the GHCi prompt, you can type all GHCi commands, but if you want to use the REPL repeatedly, you have the retype the same command every time. A few users have of course asked for command history.
Funny thing is, Eclipse doesn't give that out of the box, and on the web you can see a few frustrated people asking for it in their console views. But there seem to be no obvious solution. I was rapidly becoming one of these frustrated people, so I had a look.
The most obvious is to create our own view to handle GHCi interaction, and manage the GHCi process ourselves. Doable, but that means rewriting the whole console UI (multiple console, potentially different colors for input/output, etc). So instead I had a look at contributing to the console Eclipse opens for us.
Oh boy. As usual with Eclipse, the console API is quite daunting at first. You can create your own console, or you can just add contributors to the console UI, but since we're using the Eclipse standard classes for displaying a process, we're quite limited, and a lot of classes are created for us without any possibility of injecting our own. And nowhere did I find an easy way to just listen to what the user is sending to the process input stream!
So I didn't give up, and I managed to register key listeners and verify listeners on the actual console StyledText control, so I can listen to key presses and such. I then maintain the history of commands. There is a drop down action to see the list of commands, you can choose one from there, or you can use Control-Up and Control-Down to navigate the list. It also works when you paste in text from elsewhere. This will account for 95% of the cases, I hope. There are definitely things that don't work well: if you edit a command in the middle it won't record the proper one, for example, but these bugs I think I can live with for the moment.
For the moment it's enabled on interactive consoles (mainly for GHCi), but probably that code could be used outside of EclipseFP if anybody is interested. And of course if somebody has a better solution to the problem, let me know!

Command history will be part of the next minor release of EclipseFP, 2.3.1.

EclipseFP 2.3.0 released!

Hello, this is my pleasure to announce a new release of EclipseFP, 2.3.0, and of its companion Haskell packages, Buildwrapper (0.6.0) and Scion-Browser (0.2.9).
EclipseFP is a set of Eclipse plugins for Haskell development.

You can see the release notes for full details, but these are the main points:

• you can do search and replace in a Haskell aware manner. Basically we keep a database of where everything is defined and used in all the modules of your workspace, which lets you open a module, search for definitions or usage, rename things everywhere they're used.
• better integration with Yesod: when you have a yesod project, you can easily launch "yesod devel" on it.
• Preferences to specify the paths of all the Haskell tools we use
• More quick fixes: add OverloadedString, install missing package, etc.

Hopefully you'll find this release and its new features helpful. Of course, post any issue to the sourceforge forum. As usual, use the Eclipse install feature to update/install your plugins by pointing it to http://eclipsefp.sf.net/updates.

Happy Haskell Hacking!

Usage queries in EclipseFP 2.3.0

This post is to present a new functionality of EclipseFP 2.3.0: the ability to search where a specific item (function, type, constructor, module) is being used in a project or in the whole workspace.
The way it's done under the hood can be visualized by the following diagram:

• The EclipseFP code invokes the BuildWrapper executable when a file in the project has changed. BuildWrapper uses the GHC API to load the Haskell module from files, and get the AST. We actually use both the RenamedSource and the TypecheckedSource to combine information from both. From the AST we get a list of all the usages in the file: all the functions, for example, used in the file, and where. All this information is stored in a hidden bwinfo file,  in JSON format.
• EclipseFP then picks up the generated file and parses it. The usage data is then written in a SQLite database, whose file is stored in the plugin folder.
• All Haskell searches are then done against the SQLite database.

For the user, this gives the following possibilities:
- open a Haskell module from a dialog showing all known local modules in the workspace
- perform contextual searches for usages of a given object
- perform a search by typing a name in a dialog and maybe specifying additional criteria (search references and/or declarations, search constructors and/or types, etc).
- perform contextual rename of a given object. You can rename a function and everywhere where that function is invoked will be changed, using the Eclipse refactoring plugin.

I'm planning on releasing EclipseFP 2.3.0 pretty soon, so that people can start testing!