Forward to haskell-cafe@haskell.org for further discussion. ----- Forwarded message from Walter Moreira ----- Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 06:46:44 +0000 From: Walter Moreira To: haskell@haskell.org Subject: [Haskell] interpreter ouput in color Hi all. I was wondering if some people miss the colored output of some applications, such like the IPython enhanced shell. I've been googling for similar options for Haskell but I found nothing. I feel that the type error messages, for example, would be a lot more readable (or at least quicker to read). Is there a way to write plugins for ghci to get this?, or do you people have some suggestion about what would be the easiest component to hack for applying colors? Thank you. Cheers, Walter ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Walter, I think this is a great idea. Currently, there is an existing tool, HsColour: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/darcs/hscolour/ which does a great job of marking up source files to ansi, html and css output. I think with only a little bit of effort, it could be integrated into ghci (or a ghci wrapper written), that runs each expression in ghci through HsColour. Here's a mockup (the result of dumping ghci's output through HsColour): http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/tmp/colour-ghci.png Is someone interested in writing a wrapper over ghci that pipes input and output through HsColour? We might have to modify HsColour slightly to take input from stdin. I've put up an initial wiki page for this here: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHCi_in_colour If you've thoughts on how to implement this- -- or want to just go ahead and do it, please dive in! -- Don