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Dante for dummies

This article is outdated!

The article is old, from before I knew how to manage Emacs packages properly (the secret: use straight.el). My new article “How I use dante” is much better and I suggest you read it instead of this one.

The old article

I wanted to get started with Dante: Emacs mode for Interactive Haskell but found it difficult for various reasons. Here’s how I managed it.

  1. Get Dante

    I just downloaded dante.el so I can run it with M-x eval-buffer.

  2. Use Emacs 25

    It doesn’t seem to work with Emacs 24

  3. Get dependent packages

    • It requires lcr. It also requires attrap if you want autofix.

      I don't know how to use Emacs properly so I just went to
[MELPA](https://melpa.org/) and downloaded the files.  You
can load them with `M-x eval-buffer`.

    • It also required some other stuff like dash which I managed to install with apt.

      I don’t want to use MELPA if I don’t have to.

  4. Turn on Dante and flycheck minor modes

    You should probably use mode hooks to turn these on but I just used

    • M-x dante-mode

    • M-x flycheck-mode

  5. If it complains about missing stack

    Dante tries to work out what sort of project you are working in so it know how to launch GHCi. The way it works this out is through dante-repl-command-line-methods-alist. It checks for stack.yaml before .cabal. I have both but I want to use cabal so I had to delete the stack entry. I used M-x customize-group to do this, in the “Dante Repl Command Line Methods Alist” setting.

Then it seems that Dante just works.