Haskell coding via Emacs/Vim in Linux : organising files into projects

Question

I have two questions regarding coding Haskell in Emacs/VIM in Linux :

1. If one wanted to organise a haskell code base into multiple projects (where files of a given project are stored in a particular folder) then can emacs and vim handle this? The reason is that I have used IDE's before where all the projects are loaded at once into the session, but am not sure how this would work for Emacs/VIM.

2. Another nice thing about IDEs is that I can go the definition of a function from a given project, even if that function definition is in a separate project (i.e. stored in a separate folder). Can Emacs/VIM handle this?

There was some discussion here : Haskell IDE for Windows?

Answer 1

1. VIM/Emacs don't care how you organize your files. They're primarily editors, so you can use them to edit files no matter how you lay out your directory structure. Other than that, it's good to follow some standard conventions, or adapt the structure for tools you are going to use. You can have a look at Structure of a Haskell project. It is also convenient to use Cabal to build your project and to manage its dependencies.
2. VIM/Emacs can use Ctags index files for navigating in your project. See Tags for available options how to create these index files. The indexing tools don't expect any specific project structure, so if you need to navigate in multiple projects, you can just index a directory with multiple projects into one index file.

Answer 2

There's an Emacs mode called Projectile that allows some "project-like" functionality, which might be what you're looking for. I haven't really used it myself (I tend to stick to the old *nix way of just editing files), so I can't give you details, but it can't hurt to check it out.

Answer 3

Not sure if I understood the gist of question correctly. The following is my suggestion concerning the question of management of multiple projects in Vim, without regard to the language employed.

You could take advantage of vim sessions. With a few custom functions/keymappings in your .vimrc you'll be able to keep a separate session file for each project, either in the project directory or the one you'd dedicate for session files.

This is the general how-to: http://vim.runpaint.org/editing/managing-sessions/ And there you'll find a number of scripts that specifically address the issue of handling multiple project-specific sessions: How to auto save vim session on quit and auto reload on start including split window state?