Leksah, an Integrated Development Environment for Haskell

Leksah aims to integrate various Haskell development tools to provide a practical and pleasant development environment. The user interface is a mix of GTK+ and WebKit based components.

Documentation can be found on leksah.org.

Leksah's Nix Support

Nix is great and we have added some features to make it easier to use Nix projects with Leksah.

If your project has a default.nix file along side it (in the same directory as your cabal.project file), leksah can use nix-shell -A shells.ghc to make a cached environment for running ghc and ghci. Click on the Nix button on the toolbar to set this up for the active project (if the ghcjs build button is active it will also build a cached environment for nix-shell -A shells.ghc).

If you change your default.nix file click the Nix button again to refresh the cached environment. Caching the environment in this way makes calls to cabal new-build faster (avoiding the startup overhead of nix-shell).

A great way to set up a suitable default.nix for your project is described in project-development.md. This works even if you are not planning on using reflex in your project.

Getting Leksah

Nix (Recommended for Linux and macOS users)

Install Nix.

Then download, build and run Leksah with:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/leksah/leksah.git
cd leksah
./leksah-nix.sh ghc843

On macOS the Leksah window start below other active application windows you can use Command+Shift+Tab to bring it to the top (issue 461).

The ghc843 argument indicates Leksah should be built using GHC 8.4.3. Leksah works best if it is built with the same version of GHC that your projects use. To work on a project that uses GHC 8.2.2, just exit leksah and run ./leksah-nix.sh ghc822.

Chocolatey and MSYS2 (Recommended for Windows users)

Install Chocolatey.

Right click on Command Prompt and choose Run as Administrator. In the window run:

choco install ghc --version 8.4.4
choco install msys2

Close the Command Prompt window and open a new one (not as administrator). This time run:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/leksah/leksah.git
cd leksah
leksah.bat

Alternative Installation Method

Leksah requires ghc --version >=8.2.2 and cabal --version >=2.0. To get them go to haskell.og/download and choose the Minimal GHC or Haskell Platform.

Step 1: Install C libraries

Fedora

sudo dnf install gobject-introspection-devel webkitgtk4-devel gtksourceview3-devel

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install libgirepository1.0-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libgtksourceview-3.0-dev

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S gobject-introspection gobject-introspection-runtime gtksourceview3 webkit2gtk

macOS with MacPorts

sudo port install gobject-introspection webkit2-gtk gtksourceview3 gtk-osx-application-gtk3 adwaita-icon-theme`

You will also need to build a MacPorts compatible of GHC. First install GHC some other way then unpack the source for the GHC version you want to use and run:

sudo port install libxslt gmp ncurses libiconv llvm-3.5 libffi
./configure --prefix=$HOME/ghc-8.4.3 --with-iconv-includes=/opt/local/include --with-iconv-libraries=/opt/local/lib --with-gmp-includes=/opt/local/include --with-gmp-libraries=/opt/local/lib --with-system-libffi --with-ffi-includes=/opt/local/lib/libffi-3.2.1/include --with-ffi-libraries=/opt/local/lib --with-nm=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/nm-classic
make
make install
echo 'PATH: '"$PATH"

Make sure the $HOME/ghc-8.4.3/bin is present in PATH.

macOS with Homebrew

It might be possible to build Leksah using Homebrew now we have switched to WebKit 2. If you can figure it out please send us the details or better yet a pull request to update this file. Raise an issue if you try and it does not work.

FreeBSD

pkg install devel/gobject-introspection x11-toolkits/gtksourceview3 www/webkit2-gtk3

Step 2: Clone repository and its submodules

git clone --recursive https://github.com/leksah/leksah.git
cd leksah

Step 3.a: Build - cabal new-build variant

Step 3.a.1: Install extra tools

cabal update
cabal install alex happy
cabal install haskell-gi

Make sure ~/.cabal/bin is present in the PATH (Windows: Make sure %APPDATA%\cabal\bin is present in the PATH).

Step 3.a.2: Build and run Leksah

macOS using MacPorts

XDG_DATA_DIRS=/opt/local/share ./leksah.sh

Other OS

./leksah.sh

Step 3.b: Build - stack variant

Step 3.b.1: Install extra tools

stack setup --upgrade-cabal
stack install alex happy
stack install haskell-gi
stack install gtk2hs-buildtools

Leksah needs cabal for the metadate feature to work correctly (even when using stack):

stack install cabal-install
cabal update

Step 3.b.2: Build and run Leksah

macOS using MacPorts

XDG_DATA_DIRS=/opt/local/share stack install
stack exec --no-ghc-package-path leksah

Other OS with Gtk+ 3.20 (or newer)

stack install
stack exec --no-ghc-package-path leksah

Other OS with Gtk+ 3.18 (e.g. Ubuntu 16.04)

stack install --flag ltk:-gtk-320 --flag leksah:-gtk-320
stack exec --no-ghc-package-path leksah