What is this?

haskell-vim is a docker-based Haskell development environment with Vim 8.x. It comes with syntax highlighting and code completion powered by Haskell IDE Engine).

Why?

Vim is a highly configurable, light-weight editor extremely suitable for programming in Haskell. Compare to heavy IDEs like Eclipse, one does not need to create a project etc. before writing any code. Since the release of version 8.0, it ships an embedded terminal emulator.

Haskell IDE Engine is an excellent Language Server Protocol client compatible with GHC 8.4.3.

However, it is sometimes tricky to get it work with Vim because of the deoplete.nvim plugin. Indeed, this plugin requires Vim to be built with python3 support which is not always the case.

For example, on my Arch Linux machine, gvim is built with python3/dyn so I failed to get deoplete to work :(

With haskell-vim, everything just works out of box: syntax highlighting, code completion etc, and one can thus concentrate on learning and developing in Haskell.

How to launch?

Build from source

cd docker && docker build -t haskell-vim .

Please note that a fresh build will take a LONG time (50+ minutes on my laptop) and consumes many RAM, so be patient :)

Pull from docker hub (recommended)

Run

docker run -it --rm -v <local/path/to/workdir/>:/workspace boeingx/haskell-vim bash

The above command maps a local folder <local/path/to/workdir/> to the default work directory /home/haskell/workspace in order to have persistent data.

Screenshots

Built-in terminal

Autocompletion

Show documentation, goto definition and rename

Troubleshooting

When build docker image, I get an error saying Process exited with code: ExitFailure (-9) (THIS MAY INDICATE OUT OF MEMORY)

As the error message indicates, this is due to an out of memory. Verify that you have at least 4Gb RAM available.

If you use docker on Windows or Mac OS, edit the preference so that docker could use more memory. See this discussion

BoeingX/docker-haskell-vim