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Yi

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175 pointsnyellin16 comments

It's wonderful to see the Yi editor back in business, there seems to be some new commits in the github repo.

Yi has taken a wonderfully pragmatic approach to implementing a text editor. They were working on an incremental parser framework to power the editor. The framework was inspired by Parsec and aimed at parsing incomplete code while typing. Emacs has similar parsers but in Emacs they're implemented with a messy pile of emacs lisp, while the Haskell parser in Yi tries to do it with an easy to read domain specific language.

I also like how Yi has a very flexible frontend. They ship with Vim- and Emacs-like configurations to get started.

That's not a very informative title. I would prefer "Yi is a text editor extensible in Haskell."

"Almost discontinued extensible editor". :(

We'll be waiting for Yi IMproved... Bad puns aside, is true that the editor seems to lack current support. Last blog post was 2009. It still might be worth it to Haskell ninjas...

Not true. According to the git commit history it is being developed pretty actively. The last commit date is July 21st 2011.

As one of the recent contributors I can confirm that development has recently started back up.

Yi is more like an editor construction set than vim or emacs is. Configuration is basically plugging together a key press parser, syntax lexer, and front end with whatever customizations you want. Much like XMonad.

Ah, I somehow missed the most active repository then. Sorry.

Be forewarned -- while some of the docs say that there is a Cocoa frontend, it doesn't work. I first started looking at how to replace it a couple months ago but I hadn't chosen a best tactic. After I finish my internship at Google in a couple weeks I'm going to code up my resolution.

Finally managed to compile it on Arch Linux, using Cabal. I had to close my browser and IDE as there weren’t enough memory to compile it otherwise (it required more than 1000 MB).

I saw this a while ago and was interested. But I kept getting errors when trying to build it from source and after several tries, using several methods I found in various places on the internet, I gave up.

I like a lot the way Yi maps \ and -> to appropriate extended characters for display but leaves them in ASCII in the underlying file, but I didn't find it to be stable enough for primetime yet.

It's an absolutely useless feature but I love it too :)

There's a Vim plugin called Haskell cuteness that does the same for Haskell code but unfortunately it didn't work very well.

We actually stole that Yi feature from Emacs ('pretty-lambda', I think it was called.)

Ah, cool, found it: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PrettySymbolsForLanguages

If you are using Vim >= 7.3, you can use the vim conceal feature which works as described, but without any messy hacks!

For Haskell, here ( https://github.com/vim-scripts/Haskell-Conceal ) is a plugin that works quite well, although the lambda symbol does not seem to appear for me, and the resulting glyphs don't flow nicely with the rest of my font. It's still kind of nice!

Thanks for the tip!

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