Introduction

The tooling in the Haskell ecosystem has greatly improved these last years. Especially, the introduction of Haskell Language Server dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for newcomers. But despite its undeniable quality, HLS still chokes on big codebases such as the ones we find in professional environments.

Also, for a fast feedback loop, it is not always the most suited tool to reach for. And having the fastest feedback loop is extremely important for a good developer experience.

ghcid

The tool that always works, no matter what, even on big codebases, is ghcid. I find myself constantly getting back to it for my feedback loops.

ghcid basically starts a ghci session and watches for changes in the loaded files. Just save a file with your editor, it instantaneously reloads it and prints the eventual errors or warnings, depending on your project configuration. It is extremely versatile and can adapt to many workflows.

This is how I use it.

I open a tmux session with two vertical panes. On the left, I have neovim with my Haskell project. On the right, I have ghcid running. When I save a file, ghcid reloads the file and prints the errors. I can then look at the errors and fix them in neovim, save again, repeat.

That’s pretty cool. And this kind of setup is super general by the way. It basically works with any language. Have an editor on the left, and runs a compilation loop on the right. There are a lot of tools that watch for file changes and run a command when a file is modified. I personally like entr and feedback for this kind of task.

But anyway, we can do better. neovim has a built-in feature for this kind of compilation loop. If your compilation task can produce a file (and ghcid can do that), neovim can parse it and populate the quickfix list with the errors and warnings. Then one can browse the quickfix list and fix the errors one after another.

This makes the feedback loop even faster: I save a Haskell file in my editor, ghcid automatically updates the error file, then, with one single command (:cfile or :cf), I reload the file in neovim and jump to the first error.

Simple, easy, fast.

What I like with this workflow is also that it is not intrusive at all. It doesn’t force me to fix any issue right now. I can jump to the error whenever I want while having the compilation state of my project right under my eyes all the time.

Configuration

Now let’s talk about the required configuration for this to work. First we must configure ghcid. This can be done at the root of the project in a file called .ghcid.

$ echo "-a -o errors.err" > .ghcid

This tells ghcid to output the errors in the file errors.err, the default error file for neovim (see :h errorfile). -a is not strictly necessary. It allows executing REPL commands in the ghci session. I find it sometimes useful. More information about this can be found on here.

Now we only need to tell neovim how to parse the error file. This is done with the option errorformat (see :h errorformat). A good place to set it is in the ftplugin file for Haskell. That file will be sourced whenever a Haskell file is opened.

$ cat ~/.config/nvim/after/ftplugin/haskell.lua

vim.opt_local.errorformat =
    -- %W multi-line warning
    -- For some reason, %m doesn't work with %\\?, we need to add two lines for
    -- each case
    "%W%f:(%l\\,%c)-(%e\\,%k): warning: %m," ..
    "%W%f:(%l\\,%c)-(%e\\,%k): warning:," ..
    "%W%f:%l:%c-%k: warning: %m," ..
    "%W%f:%l:%c-%k: warning:," ..
    "%W%f:%l:%c: warning: %m," ..
    "%W%f:%l:%c: warning:," ..

    -- %E multi-line error
    "%E%f:(%l\\,%c)-(%e\\,%k): error: %m," ..
    "%E%f:(%l\\,%c)-(%e\\,%k): error:," ..
    "%E%f:%l:%c-%k: error: %m," ..
    "%E%f:%l:%c-%k: error:," ..
    "%E%f:%l:%c: error: %m," ..
    "%E%f:%l:%c: error:," ..

    -- %Z Ends a multi-line message. We end it on the first line of the carret
    -- message.
    "%Z %\\+|%.%#," ..

    -- Continue a multi-line message
    "%C    %m," ..

    -- Swallow everything else
    "%-G%.%#"

And that’s it. Now when calling the command :cf in neovim, it will read the error file, parse it according to the errorformat option and jump to the first error.

Then one can browse the errors with the usual quickfix commands: :cnext, :cprev, :cfirst, :clast, etc…

Conclusion

This simple trick allows having a fast feedback loop when working with Haskell.

One shortcoming of this setup is that it doesn’t work when working in a multi-package project. This is because the errors returned by GHC are relative to the project. This can be easily solved by cd into the directory before starting ghcid.

I have a better solution for this as well, but it is slightly more involved and requires a bit of lua code. I will write about it in a future post.

That’s it for today. Let me know if you find this useful.

28-11-2024: Read the follow-up in this next post.

Related tools

• ghcid.nvim : A neovim plugin for ghcid. I was using it at some point. But I like my solution better because it is simpler and only use neovim built-in features.
• ghcidwatch : A rewrite of ghcid in rust developed by Mercury. I have never tried it, but it seems that it is able to write an error file in the same format as ghcid. It should then work with this setup.