Editor support

[CFiggers]

What editors are people using with Hy? How's the editor support story?

I mostly use VS Code, and I notice the top downloaded Hy extension in the store is pretty bare bones—pretty much just syntax highlighting and that's it.

It's common for Lisps in particular to offer REPL integration via editor plugins, so I'm curious whether that exists for Hy and in what editor.

[Kodiologist]

Emacs's inferior-Lisp mode works fine for Hy. I added some basic support for Org Babel in Daylight. I don't think anybody has been serious about maintaining editor support, and it's not a topic that interests me.

[cmhobbs]

I like to use it with Geany with the Lisp document type.

[CFiggers]

It would have made sense to mention hylang/hy-mode for Emacs and hylang/vim-hy for vim, considering they're "first party" editor plugins hosted under the hylang GitHub organization.

Is there any interest in a hylang/vscode-hy ? And who would be the decision-maker for such a thing?

If there is interest, I wouldn't mind contributing substantially to it. I already have a simple "Evaluate selected form in REPL" integration patched into my local VS Code and that alone is already a huge ergonomic improvement.

I would take significant inspiration from BetterThanTomorrow/calva for Clojure and Janet's janet-lang/vscode-janet.

[Kodiologist]

I upgraded your collaborator role. Can you do it now?

[CFiggers]

Yes! Thank you.

[danieltanfh95]

Using vscode-hy with bracket-select and send to terminal, works pretty well for my setup. Happily deploying Hy in production, would love to see more editor support, I don't mind paying even.

[CFiggers]

@danieltanfh95 I just pushed v0.0.3 of hylang/vscode-hy, which adds ParEdit-style structural editing commands and on-type auto-formatting.

v0.0.1 added an "Evaluate in REPL" shortcut and v0.0.2 was an overhaul of the syntax highlighting.

In the future I want to add Intellisense autocompletion and, if I can figure out how to do it, a background Hy REPL to dynamically pull doc information into a pop-up on symbol mouse-over.

I'd be really interested in your feedback if you give it a try!

[danieltanfh95]

@danieltanfh95 I just pushed v0.0.3 of hylang/vscode-hy, which adds ParEdit-style structural editing commands and on-type auto-formatting.

v0.0.1 added an "Evaluate in REPL" shortcut and v0.0.2 was an overhaul of the syntax highlighting.

In the future I want to add Intellisense autocompletion and, if I can figure out how to do it, a background Hy REPL to dynamically pull doc information into a pop-up on symbol mouse-over.

I'd be really interested in your feedback if you give it a try!

Thanks, I'll go test it out!

[rej696]

I have been using Neovim with the vim-hy plugin, and Olical/conjure plugin for a great integrated repl (works out of the box with hy). I also use eraserhd/parinfer-rust neovim plugin which makes lisp editing a breeze!

[MicahElliott]

Awesome. Sounds like vscode and vim are pretty first class environments for Hy then. Would love to see at least Emacs be on that plane too. 🤞

[MicahElliott]

I'm using Emacs, as I'd expect the majority of lispers do. But the tooling is a big hole for adopting Hy. And the lisp interactive repl tooling/workflow IMO is the main reason to even consider Hy.

In order to get completion working (which I think is a must-have), you need to have jedhy installed and working. You have to already be down a path to getting hy-mode installed, and then realize you need a 4-year-old Jedhy python package that states clearly:

Last Hy version verified working for: Hy 0.16.0

So then you go track down that Hy release and discover that going back to Python v3.8 isn't far enough back. That's where I gave up and can't justify spending more time just to try out Hy in Emacs to see if it's even got a feasible workflow. Even if jedhy were working, we'd want it to not rely on company since there are newer/simpler completion frameworks now.

So this request is to somehow ensure that Emacs (and maybe other editor) tooling is somewhat up-to-date, even if that means the hylang org does the dev/maintenance.

Clojure has become a huge success in large part due to the existence of CIDER. Hy doesn't need something similarly amazing, but it does need some basics like completion to work.

[Kodiologist]

I got the email. jedhy is now GPL ≥3, as God intended.

[pkulev]

I am refreshing jedhy's code for a couple of days, half of tests are passing now. I think I will get fully working version soon and then start thinking on hy-mode.
https://github.com/ekaschalk/jedhy/compare/master...pkulev:jedhy:master?expand=1

Can upstream of jedhy be forked into hylang organization soon? I'm wondering where to send PRs 😅

[Kodiologist]

It still needs a maintainer.

[pkulev]

I think I can maintain it, at least for a while. I want to overhaul emacs hy-mode and for this I need jedhy running perfectly.

[Kodiologist]

Okay. Once you get jedhy working to your satisfaction with Hy master, if you're still interested in active maintenance, let me know.

[CFiggers]

I just pushed v0.0.3 of vscode-hy, which adds ParEdit-style structural editing commands and on-type auto-formatting (which mostly means auto-indentation and whitespace management). v0.0.1 added REPL integration and v0.0.2 was an overhaul of the syntax highlighting.

Testers and contributors welcome.