Working on Haskell code in vim

I decided to get a fresh vim install properly set up for some Haskell development, and went down the road of using hdevtools, vim-hdevtools and Syntastic. Below are notes on some issues I encountered setting up vim-hdevtools.

The instructions on the GitHub page for hdevtools & vim-hdevtools linked above are simple enough, but I ran into a couple of issues. I’m using the sandbox feature added in Cabal 1.18, and by default hdevtools doesn’t know to look for a .cabal-sandbox folder. So, when I tried to use any of the hdevtools commands, I received an error message similar to the following:

Error loading targets
(file):
Could not find module `(module)'
Use -v to see a list of the files searched for.

This is an issue that a few people have run into, and I found a link to this solution in the archives of the #Haskell IRC channel. Adding it to my .vimrc seems to have fixed this error, and I can now use all the hdevtool commands in vim. I’m still having issues with *.cabal files that specify default-extensions (vim-hdevtools doesn’t seem to pick these up).

Also, if you get an error message similar to the following:

E492: Not an editor command: ...

make sure that hdevtools is on your path and that you have plugin files for specific file types enabled by adding

filetype plugin on

to your .vimrc.