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Introduction

Scion is a Haskell library that aims to provide Haskell source code inspection and transformation functionality as well as various other features that may be useful for an IDE.

Most of Scion's functionality is based on the GHC API. Scion tries to be front-end agnostic; it provides both a Haskell API and servers for non-Haskell clients such as Emacs (no Vim, volunteers required).

Installation

(For developer builds see section "Hacking" below.)

Scion requires GHC 6.10.1 or later. All other dependencies should be on Hackage and can be installed using cabal-install in the lib directory:

$ cd dir/to/scion/lib
$ cabal install

Scion supports various configuration flags which are useful when working on Scion itself.

Usage

Since Scion is a library, you should consult the haddock documentation for how to use it. However, you may look at the Emacs frontend for inspiration.

The Emacs frontend is implemented as a Haskell server. The server is a separate package, scion-server, which depends on the main scion package.

Emacs

Install Scion with Emacs support:

$ cd dir/to/scion/server
$ cabal install

You'll end up with a binary called "scion_server".

$ ~/.cabal/bin/scion_server

Add the following to your emacs configuration (typically "~/.emacs"):

(add-to-list 'load-path "<scion>/emacs")
(require 'scion)

;; if ./cabal/bin is not in your $PATH
(setq scion-program "~/.cabal/bin/scion_server")

(defun my-haskell-hook ()
  ;; Whenever we open a file in Haskell mode, also activate Scion
  (scion-mode 1)
  ;; Whenever a file is saved, immediately type check it and
  ;; highlight errors/warnings in the source.
  (scion-flycheck-on-save 1))

(add-hook 'haskell-mode-hook 'my-haskell-hook)

Scion mode needs to communicate with the external server. By default it will automatically start the server when needed. See "Manually Connecting to Scion" below for how to connect to the server manually.

The scion server process inherits the environment variables from the Emacs process. Depending on your system this may be different than what you'd get if you started the server from the shell. To adjust the PATH environment variable from within Emacs, add something like the following to your .emacs:

;; add ~/usr/bin to the PATH
(setenv "PATH" "$HOME/usr/bin:$PATH" t)

Once you have a running and connected Scion server, you can use the commands provided by scion-mode:

  • C-c C-x C-l (scion-load) load the current file with Scion. If the file is within a Cabal project this will prompt to use the settings from one of the components in the package description file. You can still choose to load only the current file using the default settings.

  • C-c C-o (scion-open-cabal-project) configures a Cabal project and loads the meta-data from a Cabal file. Note that this does not type check or load anything. If you change the Cabal file of a project, call this function to update the session with the new settings.

If loading generates any errors or warnings, a buffer will appear and list them all. Pressing RET on a note will jump to its source location. Pressing q closes the buffer, and C-c C-n (scion-list-compiler-notes) brings it back. Use M-n (scion-next-note-in-buffer) and M-p (scion-previous-note-in-buffer) to navigate within the notes of one buffer.

Completion

The following commands offer completion for a few things.

  • C-c i l (haskell-insert-language) asks for a LANGUAGE pragma and adds it to the top of the file.

  • C-c i p (haskell-insert-pragma) inserts a pragma at the current cursor position. (At the moment this doesn't try to make sense of the selected pragma, however.)

  • C-c i m (haskell-insert-module-name) inserts the name of an external module (external), i.e., a module not from the current package.

  • C-c i f (haskell-insert-flag) insert (GHC) command line flag at point. (Really only makes sense within an OPTiONS_GHC pragma.)

Experimental features

The following should work most of the cases.

  • C-c C-. (scion-goto-definition) jumps to the definition of the identifier at point. If there is no identifier at point, offers a list to complete on a particular identifier. This currently only works for identifiers defined within the same project.

  • C-c C-t shows type of identifier at point. This only works if the current file typechecks, but then it also works for local identifiers. For polymorphic function it will show the type to which they are instantiated, e.g.,

    f x = x + (1::Int)

    Calling this command on + will print Int -> Int -> Int instead of Num a => a -> a -> a.

Manually Connecting to Scion

If you set the variable scion-auto-connect to 'ask (the default is 'always), Scion will ask whether to start the server. If you set it to nil you need to manually connect to the server.

You can start the server manually on the command line and then use

M-x scion-connect

to connect to that server. However, most of the time it will be more convenient to start the server from within Emacs:

M-x scion

Vim: ensure :echo has('python') returns 1

add to your ~/.vimrc (TODO make this lazy so that python is only loaded when required!):

  py scionConnectionSetting = ('socket', ("localhost",4005))
  set runtimepath+=<path to scion repo/vim_runtime_path/>

:e some_hs_file.hs
:OpenCabalProject

:LoadComponent library
or
:LoadComponent executable:cabal_executable_name

At this point you should already get some compilation errors.

use
:BackgroundTypecheckFile

before
:ThingAtPoint
You should see something like:
  {'Just': 'print :: [Char] -> IO ()'}

Have a look at vim_runtime_path/ftplugin/haskell.vim to see a list of all
commands which are implemented yet.

Bug Reports

Please send bug reports or feature requests to the Issue tracker.

Discussion

For discussions about Scion use the scion-lib-devel mailing list.

Hacking

The main repository for Scion is hosted on Github. Get it via

$ git clone git://github.com/nominolo/scion

Send patches or pull requests to nominolo (email address at googlemail dot com). Note that, if you fork the project on Github your fork won't take up additional space on your account.

Building

For development it is probably easier to use the GNU make than Cabal directly. The makefile includes a file called config.mk which is not present by default. You can use the provided config.mk.sample and edit it:

$ cp config.mk.sample config.mk
$ edit config.mk

After that, the makefile takes care of the rest.

$ make           # configure and build
$ make install   # configure, build, and install

If you don't have the dependencies, yet, and have cabal-install, the following may be helpful (If it's not in the path, adjust config.mk accordingly):

$ make cabal-install

(This also installs Scion, but that shouldn't interfere with hacking.)

Using an in-place GHC

GHC 6.10.1 has a couple of problems. For example, not all error messages are reported using the GHC API but instead are printed to stdout/stderr. Some parts also call exitWith directly. GHC's HEAD branch has some of these bugs fixed and may contain new features not present in the stable branch. If you want to compile against an inplace GHC, the following steps should work:

  1. On windows, make sure that Cabal finds the inplace gcc

    $ cd /path/to/ghc
$ cp `which gcc` ghc/

    (Adjust to version of GCC that GHC was compiled with.)

  2. Set the GHC_PATH variable to the correct path to for your system. Make sure not to set HC, PKG, or HADDOCK, they will automatically be set to point to the inplace versions.

  3. Use make or make cabal-install as above.

KNOWN PITFALLS

If you get an error message like this: "scion_server: mkTopLevEnv: not interpreted main:Main" then you should rm [Ss]etup.hi [Ss]etup.o in the project directory.