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haskell / haskell-mode

Emacs mode for Haskell
http://haskell.github.io/haskell-mode/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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C-c C-l gives unhelpul error #1560

Open monnier opened 7 years ago

monnier commented 7 years ago

I guess this is related to #522 (but I couldn't figure out how to re-open it). Now when I try C-c C-l, I get an error saying

Run ‘C-h f haskell-mode‘ for instruction how to setup a Haskell interaction mode.

but then if I do C-h f haskell-mode, I only get told that there are:

Interaction modes:

    ‘interactive-haskell-mode’
      Interact with per-project GHCi processes through a REPL and
      directory-aware sessions.

    ‘inf-haskell-mode’
      Interact with a GHCi process using comint-mode. Deprecated.

[ the last part has obviously a problem since I can;t find any inf-haskell-mode. ]

The problem here is that nothing tells me how to do what I wanted with C-c C-l. Looking at commit ca94d814b943afeea5bc418df3773f19be9ac8e3 is worse: it says "revamped" but it should just say "gutted", since the functionality that was bound to C-c C-l was simply thrown away. That seems completely pointless: if you want to deprecate inf-haskell.el, then just let it rot, but throwing away some of its code while keeping a tiny mostly useless shell is just infuriating the user who gets the impression he might be able to find his old C-c C-l somewhere in there.

purcell commented 7 years ago

@vasanthaganeshk - anything we can do to make this less frustrating?

vasanthaganeshk commented 7 years ago

Removed the inconsistent docs. I think something along the lines of asking the user to start interactive-haskell-mode must be sufficient.

monnier commented 7 years ago

Why not just enable that mode by default? After all, the other mode is deprecated (and has been emptied of its contents on top of that), so the inf-haskell-mode is simply not a usable option any more. The choice imposed on the user is a complete waste of time for her.

vasanthaganeshk commented 7 years ago

It is my opinion that we don't make interactive-haskell-mode to be default because some people might want to use Intero and some people might want to use lsp based minor mode (some work seems to be going on in haskell ide engine). One more thing is that some people might have configured key bindings used in interactive-haskell-mode to do something else. Some people might not want to use interactive-haskell-mode at all because with larger code bases Emacs might get slow with loading the big code base into the GHCi and the queries to GHCi might take longer to respond.

monnier commented 7 years ago

None of these problems are insurmountable. You can make it be the default without making it any harder for users to use something else and without imposing any extra burden to those users who don't use the features.

That's what we had before with inf-haskell (which did not get in the way for those users who didn't use it).

E.g. if it's made the default, then the key bindings like C-c C-l don't need to be provided by a minor mode map (which makes it difficult for users to override them with their own choices) but can be directly in the major mode map, where it's easy to override.