
Hi Haskellers. A short while ago I asked about the possibility to have the output of ghci in color. Thanks to Donald Stewart who set up a wiki page to continue the attempt. Other people suggested HsColour and GUI's (thanks too). I'm not so interested in highlighting the snippets of code which ghci displays, but to use different colors for the different types of output: different colors for the prompt, input, warnings, exceptions, normal output, etc. Are any of these ideas viable?: 1. Hack the code of Interactive.hs in the GHC distribution and substitute the calls to 'putStr[Ln]' by some thin wrapper which can write with colors, according to a command line option (--color or --colour, for example), maybe using HsColour. This looks easy enough and I'd be willing to do it, but it's intrusive, and one has to mantain a different version of ghci in parallel with the main ghci. 2. Use GHC as library (from 6.6 on) and write a similar application as ghci, with more emphasis in the 'interactive' part of the name (in the same way as the relation between Python and the IPython extended shell). This is more work and more duplicate efforts, but it may be worthly, perhaps. 3. Write a wrapper which communicates with ghci via pipes. I read some attempts about this somewhere, and people suggested an approach as in #2. I haven't mentioned the GUI applications, since I would like to just have something in the spirit of ghci (command line oriented), but with colors or with configurable output. Which approach do you people think it is best? Sorry for the long message. Cheers, Walter