Vim Haskell Conceal+

This bundle provides extended Haskell Conceal feature for Vim. The feature is used to display unicode operators in Haskell code without changing the underlying file.

This package offers more (and, more importantly, configurable) features than the baseline vim-haskellConcealbundle. The baseline bundle has numerous forks, which is possible to combine, so everyone is welcome to share, improve or contribute new notations to this Conceal Plus package.

GitHub: https://github.com/enomsg/vim-haskellConcealPlus

Why Concealing

• Using things like '->' instead real arrows '→' was never a deliberate choice, but a choice made due to limitations of teletypewriters and input inconvenience.

• With concealing you don't have to deal with cumbersome unicode-input methods, yet you can enjoy proper notation.

• It is not only about aesthetics. Excess of multi-character functions may create visual noise, which negatively affects readability. Using special symbols and true arrows, together with colors and bold/italic face seems to improve the situation. The image shows Vim with and without concealing, both running in a plain terminal emulator:

• Using concealing instead of -unicode versions of packages also has some advantages. Mainly, concealing does not require any changes to the source code, it is backwards-compatible with idiomatic code. Secondly, with concealing no special input methods are needed. Plus, currently some features are hardly possible without editor's concealing (e.g. power superscripts).

Installation

Using Vim built-in pack support:

$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/vim-haskellConcealPlus/start
$ cd ~/.vim/pack/vim-haskellConcealPlus/start
$ git clone https://github.com/enomsg/vim-haskellConcealPlus
$ echo "syn on" >> ~/.vimrc # If not already in .vimrc
$ echo "setlocal conceallevel=2" >> ~/.vimrc # If not already in .vimrc
$ echo "set concealcursor=nciv" >> ~/.vimrc # Optional

Available Options

'q' option to disable concealing of scientific constants (e.g. π)
'℘' option to disable concealing of powerset function
'𝐒' option to disable String type to 𝐒 concealing
'𝐓' option to disable Text type to 𝐓 concealing
'𝐄' option to disable Either/Right/Left to 𝐄/𝑅/𝐿 concealing
'𝐌' option to disable Maybe/Just/Nothing to 𝐌/𝐽/𝑁 concealing
'A' option to not try to preserve indentation
's' option to disable space consumption after ∑,∏,√ and ¬ functions
'*' option to enable concealing of asterisk with '⋅' sign
'x' option to disable default concealing of asterisk with '×' sign
'E' option to enable ellipsis concealing with ‥  (two dot leader)
'e' option to disable ellipsis concealing with … (ellipsis sign)
'⇒' option to disable `implies` concealing with ⇒
'⇔' option to disable `iff` concealing with ⇔
'r' option to disable return (η) and join (µ) concealing
'b' option to disable bind (left and right) concealing
'f' option to enable formal (★) right bind concealing
'c' option to enable encircled b/d (ⓑ/ⓓ) for right and left binds
'h' option to enable partial concealing of binds (e.g. »=)
'C' option to enable encircled 'm' letter ⓜ concealing for fmap
'l' option to disable fmap/lift concealing with ↥
'↱' option to disable mapM/forM concealing with ↱/↰
'w' option to disable 'where' concealing with "due to"/∵ symbol
'-' option to disable subtract/(-) concealing with ⊟
'I' option to enable alternative ':+' concealing with with ⨢
'i' option to disable default concealing of ':+' with ⅈ
'R' option to disable realPart/imagPart concealing with ℜ/ℑ
'T' option to enable True/False constants concealing with bold 𝐓/𝐅
't' option to disable True/False constants concealing with italic 𝑇/𝐹
'B' option to disable Bool type to 𝔹 concealing
'Q' option to disable Rational type to ℚ concealing
'Z' option to disable Integer type to ℤ concealing
'N' option to disable Natural, Nat types to ℕ concealing
'D' option to disable Double type to 𝔻 concealing
'C' option to disable Complex type to ℂ concealing
'1' option to disable numeric superscripts concealing, e.g. x²
'a' option to disable alphabet superscripts concealing, e.g. xⁿ

The flags can be specified via hscoptions variable. For example, let hscoptions="fc" in your ~/.vimrc.

Known Issues and Hints:

• Concealing may seriously mess up indentation. By default the bundle tries to preserve spaces for commonly troublesome symbols (e.g. ->, <- and => arrows). But to be sure about indentation, you still have to see the non-concealed code. set conceallevel=0 might be handy in these cases.

• set concealcursor=nciv seem to not play well with Vim matchparen feature (which is enabled by default). You can either disable concealing under the cursor, or disable matchparen by adding let loaded_matchparen=1 at the very top of your ~/.vimrc.

• With set concealcursor=nciv navigation through concealed parts of code might be somewhat irritating because the cursor behaves a bit differently. It becomes less of an issue if you are used to Vim's w/b commands (word forward/backward). You can also try set concealcursor=ncv instead.

• Finding proper fonts might be a pain. Most of modern, so called programming fonts (Inconsolata, Anonymous Pro, etc.) often lack decent unicode support. As a recommendation, try DejaVu Sans Mono.

  Update: thanks to monospacifier package, fonts are no longer a problem. Pick your favourite font, then in addition download one of the "monospacified" fallback fonts, save into ~/.fonts, and adjust fontconfig, e.g. ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf:

    <?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
    <fontconfig>
    <dir>~/.fonts</dir>
    <alias>
    	<family>monospace</family>
    	<prefer>
    		<family>TeX Gyre Schola Math monospacified for DejaVu Sans Mono</family>
    	</prefer>
    </alias>
    </fontconfig>
  

• Most of the terminal emulators have one or more issues with regard to the unicode characters handling. Emulators that don't have problems with unicode might be pretty slow. As a recommendation, try xst, or evilvte (it has weird configuration, but draws things correctly) or lxterminal (seems to be quite capable, but limited configurability) or any other terminal emulator that happened to work for you.

  xst is known to work well with DejaVu Sans Mono, plus monospacified fonts as a fallback.