The Big Rewrite

[dag]

Vim2hs is a bit of a kitchen sink that I've been using for experimenting with Haskell in Vim, and that I've thus intentionally avoided announcing officially anywhere.

I want to extract the good parts of it into separate Vim addons, make those more polished, fully documented and more idiomatic for Vim addons, and independent of each other when that makes sense.

• Haskell filetype replacement: vim-haskell
  • Give the user more control without custom options, for example don't enforce conceallevel or foldmethod etc but instead document how to set those if you want to use those features
  • Maybe try making options like HSP buffer-local and set those automatically based on pragmas in the file
  • Maybe try context-based highlighting such that e.g. the whole of a data declaration gets a base color, like how type signatures are highlighted in vim2hs. This might be slow though, and gets tricky with things like type families.
  • Alternatively maybe aim for fast syntax highlighting with less complex regexps
  • Fold more! In particular, nested folds. Things like case-exprs could conceivably be folded. Might be slow if using syntax folding, maybe use foldexpr instead.
  • Experimenting with embedded syntax in QQs was fun, but how much are they used? Which are used more? How much does it slow down things? We're also missing the perhaps most used QQs, those from Yesod.
  • Maybe make QQ syntax providers pluggable and separate addons, maybe via user events
• Cabal filetype repleacement: vim-cabal
• Heist filetype: vim-heist, if I feel like it (as I don't really use Heist myself)
• HPaste plugin: vim-hpaste
  • Properly map filetypes
  • Replace the prompts with arguments to :HPaste with sensible defaults (g:hpaste_author || $USER, no channel, file name as title)
  • Consider using the hpasteit program from Hackage
• HLint compiler support: vim-hlint, if at all
  • Contribute a syntax checker to Syntastic, useful in combination with the hdevtools syntax checker which doesn't do hlint (unlike ghc-mod)
  • ghcmod-vim has something similar to our :HLint, but I don't think it uses Vim's compiler feature
• UltiSnips: look into contributing them upstream or to the snipmate-snippets collection once snipmate is ported to UltiSnips
• Tabular patterns: maybe vim-tabular-haskell, but maybe better polish up my AlignByCurrentSymbol as a generic Vim addon not just for Haskell
• Layout as text objects: drop it, tell people to use vim-textobj-indent instead. There might be an opportunity to make a brand new vim-textobj-haskell though, something like Chris Done's syntax-mode for emacs, but vim-textobj-fold could also be useful with better folding in vim-haskell.
• Automatic Haskell tags: vim-haskell-tags
  • lushtags is great but doesn't work with ^] etc
  • Make the generator setting a list instead and use the first one whose executable is installed

Generically applicable:

• Properly license everything
• By idiomatic for Vim addons I mean for example dropping the obsessive use of autoloading and functions and function arguments; Vimscript is not designed for writing structured, modular code like that
• Use \v for cleaner regexps

[ianbollinger]

Please do license this! haskellmode-vim also has no license, so that leaves few Haskell-related Vim bundles that people can legally use or modify. :(

[ches]

Yes, please drop a license on here!

I might be interested in chatting about some of the modularization—I saw vim-cabal split off already and I was thinking of doing something similar with some features inspired by vim-bundler—but seems you've been quiet on these projects for awhile so probably you haven't had much time for them recently.

If you could find a short moment to at least apply a license to vim2hs that'd make some of us feel good :grin: