Ghcid and VS Code

Summary: There's now a Ghcid VS Code addin that gives you red squiggles.

I've been using Ghcid for about 3 years, and VS Code for about 6 months. Ghcid alone is able to display the errors and warnings, and update them whenever you save. In this post I'll show how VS Code users can also click on errors to jump to them, and how to get red squiggles in the text buffer for errors.

Clicking on errors

Using a recent VS Code, if you run ghcid from the terminal window, hold Ctrl and click the filename and it jumps to the right location in the erroneous file.

Red squiggles

Red squiggles are now possible using the haskell-ghcid addin. To get it working:

• Run ghcid -o ghcid.txt which will produce a file ghcid.txt which updates every time ghcid updates. Running the underlying ghci with -ferror-spans will significantly improve the errors reported.
• Open ghcid.txt in VS Code as the active editor. Run the VS Code command (Ctrl+Shift+P) named "Watch Ghcid output".

These steps cause the ghcid errors to appear in the VS Code Problems pane, and have red squiggles in the editor. Even though the errors are in the proper problems pane, I still prefer the output provided by the ghcid terminal, so still look at that.

The VS Code addin is not very well polished - but I'm using it on a daily basis.