I've been wondering if there have been attempts to provide some library/API or similiar facility (other than pointing your web-browser to the static Haddock HTML report) for looking up Haddock comments associated with Haskell symbols?
As an obvious application: When coding in dynamic languages (e.g. Python, Elisp, or GNU R to name a few), I've learned to appreciate the ability to lookup up documentation interactively from the tab-completing REPL w/o having to "switch context/focus" to different application (as I currently do: I have to switch from GHCi to a web-browser and first locate the appropriate package/module and then find the symbol I'm interested in).
I have the following in my .ghci: -- hoogle integration :def hoogle \q -> return $ ":! hoogle --color=true --count=15 \"" ++ q ++ "\"" :def doc \q -> return $ ":! hoogle --color=true --info \"" ++ q ++ "\"" Which can be used from GHCi like so: Prelude> :doc map Searching for: map Prelude map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b] map f xs is the list obtained by applying f to each element of xs, i.e., > map f [x1, x2, ..., xn] == [f x1, f x2, ..., f xn] > map f [x1, x2, ...] == [f x1, f x2, ...] From package base map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b] Have a look at [1]. Cheers, Simon [1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hoogle#GHCi_Integration