Yi is a text editor written and extensible in Haskell. The goal of Yi is to provide a flexible, powerful and correct editor core dynamically scriptable in Haskell. Yi is a Haskell interpreter[1], very much like Emacs is an Emacs Lisp interpreter; however, the authors of the Yi paper point out that this technique is as powerful as the Emacs method of loading at runtime dynamically typed code but can be accomplished with static typed Haskell code - allowing for greater performance and safety. Specifically, Yi is implemented as a small executable program which compiles through GHC the larger body of code which actually constitutes a useful editor; this small 'kernel' can repeatedly recompile (and thus type-checking) the extensions. This makes it easy to dynamically hack, experiment and modify Yi despite it being written in a strongly statically typed language. Using Haskell as a first-class extension languages means that other libraries and tools written in Haskell are also readily usable in editor code. The long term goal of the project is to in essence make Yi the editor of choice for Haskell hackers in much the same way that Emacs is the editor of choice for Lisp programmers.
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Front ends
Yi can use either gtk2hs or vty as front ends, so users can choose their favorite interface.
"Emulation modes"
The primary emulation modes for Yi are vim and emacs. Keybindings for vi, mg and nano and other are also provided. Other editor interfaces can be written by the user to extend Yi.
References
- ^ This is implemented by binding to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler API; in other words, Yi will call a built-in copy (hsplugs) of GHC
- Stewart, Don; Chakravarty, Manuel (September 2005). "Dynamic Applications From the Ground Up". Haskell '05: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell workshop: 27-38. ISBN 1-59593-071-X. Retrieved on 2007-11-25.
