Now I’ve got back into the swing of hacking and prototyping in Haskell, I have spent some time tweaking my workflow in my editor of choice, Visual Studio Code.

The approach that I currently favour is to run GHCi in the integrated terminal and run the :reload and :main commands to iteratively reload and run my programs. What has hobbled me a little is the (apparent) inability to directly automate this by assigning the action to a keyboard shortcut. Fortunately, it turns out that writing VSCode extensions is reasonably straightforward. So, it is with great fanfare that I announce GHCi Helper. This simple extension adds the following two commands:

• ghciHelperStart: Creates a terminal and runs stack ghci in it
• ghciHelperReload: Sends :reload and :main commands to the terminal opened with the ghciHelperStart command

I can now bind a keyboard shortcut (I’m currently using F7) to the second command and I have my rapid reload/rerun development cycle.

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