igloo:

Hi all,

We've been weighing up the options to solve the recent problems that editline has given us, and we think that this is the best way forward:

For 6.12:

* http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2811 Implement unicode support for text I/O (we've had this on the TODO list for some time now; it was slated for 6.10, but didn't make it)

* http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2812 Switch to using haskeline instead of editline Haskeline should be able to use the above unicode support, rather than the utf8-string package

* http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2813 Create (and ship with GHC) a utf8 bytestring-a-like I'm not sure if this is actually needed by either of the above, but it is certainly related, and something we want to do anyway

We won't be trying to get any of the above into future 6.10 releases. However, for 6.10 you can use Judah's ghci-haskeline: http://code.haskell.org/~judah/ghci-haskeline/ which uses the GHC API and the haskeline package to implement the GHCi frontend.

If you have any problems using ghci-haskeline, then it is likely that GHCi in 6.12 will have the same problems, so please let us know!

Comments and criticisms welcomed!

Can we construct a set of tests that determines if a given line editing code base works to our satisfaction? -- Don