haskdogs-0.5.4: README.md

HaskDogs
========

Haskdogs is a shellscript-like tool which creates tag file for entire haskell
project directory. It takes into account first-level dependencies by recursively
scanning imports and adding matching projects to the dependency list. Next,
Haskdogs uses cabal or stack to unpack their sources into a temporary directory,
which is `~/.haskdogs` by default. Finally, hasktags is called to produce the
`tags` file.

As a result, programmer can use his/her text editor supporting tags (e.g. vim)
to jump directly to definition of any standard or foreign function he/she uses.

Note, that haskdogs relies on some GNU programs as well as on Unix shell
commands such as 'cd', 'mkdir' and so on. Also it would run 'stack' and ghc-pkg'
in order to obtain package information.

INSTALL
-------

Check the dependencies. Currently they are: stack, hasktags, GNU find,
which and shell.

Please follow stack's documentation(https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack) to install stack.

	$ stack install hasktags haskdogs

Make sure that PATH contains path to your stack binaries directory ($HOME/.local/bin by default).

RUNNING
-------

1. Make sure yoy have installed hasktags and put it in PATH.

2. cd to your Haskell project dir

       $ cd $HOME/my-haskell-project

3. Run haskdogs without arguments to generate tags file in Vim-compatible format

       $ haskdogs

Emacs users would probably want to add -e hasktags option to build Emacs-compatible TAGS.

    $ haskdogs --help
    haskdogs - Recursive hasktags-based TAGS generator for a Haskell project

    Usage: haskdogs [--version] [-d|--dir-list FILE] [-f|--file-list FILE]
                    [--hasktags-args OPTS] [--stack-args OPTS] [--ghc-pkg-args OPTS]
                    [--use-stack ARG] [--deps-dir PATH] [--raw] [OPTS]

    Available options:
      -h,--help                Show this help text
      --version                Show version number
      -d,--dir-list FILE       File containing directory list to process (use '-' to
                               read from stdin)
      -f,--file-list FILE      File containing Haskell sources to process (use '-'
                               to read from stdin)
      --hasktags-args OPTS     Arguments to pass to hasktags. -c -x is the default.
                               Not for raw mode.
      --stack-args OPTS        Arguments to pass to stack
      --ghc-pkg-args OPTS      Arguments to pass to ghc-pkgs
      --use-stack ARG          Execute ghc-pkg via stack, arg is ON, OFF or AUTO
                               (the default)
      --deps-dir PATH          Specify the directory PATH to place the dependencies
                               of the project. Default is [/home/grwlf/.haskdogs]
      --raw                    Don't execute hasktags, print list of files to tag on
                               the STDOUT. The output may be piped into hasktags
                               like this: `haskdogs --raw | hasktags -c -x STDIN'
      OPTS                     More hasktags options, use `--' to pass flags
                               starting with `-'. Not for raw mode.


The following error could be caused by (over)strict Haskell policy regarding
Unicode locale:

    haskdogs: fd:5: hGetContents: invalid argument (invalid byte sequence)

It usually happens when the program tries to print Unicode character to
non-unicode console. In order to overcome, try the following setting:

    export LANG=en_US.UTF8


VIM HINT
--------

Hasdogs (and underlying Hasktags) use simple scanning algorithm so it may become
confused facing functions with identical names. In this case Hasktags includes
all of them in the output file so user has to decide which tag to jump to. Vim
offers :tag and :ts commands to deal with such situations but it is somewhat
cumbersome to type them every time.

To speedup things a bit I use the following vim binding. It iterates over all
same tags quickly with just one C-] command.

    " Cyclic tag navigation {{{
	let g:rt_cw = ''
	function! RT()
		let cw = expand('<cword>')
		try
			if cw != g:rt_cw
				execute 'tag ' . cw
				call search(cw,'c',line('.'))
			else
				try
					execute 'tnext'
				catch /.*/
					execute 'trewind'
				endtry
				call search(cw,'c',line('.'))
			endif
			let g:rt_cw = cw
		catch /.*/
			echo "no tags on " . cw
		endtry
	endfunction
	map <C-]> :call RT()<CR>
    " }}}

Just copy the code above to your ~/.vimrc and reload the vim.


NIX NOTE
--------

The easiest way to generate Hakell tags on [Nix](https://nixos.org/nix)-machine
is to run Haskdogs from `nix-shell` as follows:

    nix-shell -p haskellPackages.haskdogs haskellPackages.hasktags haskellPackages.cabal-install ghc
    (nix-shell) $ haskdogs