How To Install hdevtools on Ubuntu 18.04
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install hdevtools on Ubuntu 18.04.
What is hdevtools
hdevtools is:
hdevtools is a backend for text editor plugins, to allow for things such as syntax and type checking of Haskell code, and retrieving type information, all directly from within your text editor.
The advantage that hdevtools has over ghc-mod is that it runs silently in a persistent background process, and therefore is able to keeps all of your Haskell modules and dependent libraries loaded in memory. This way, when you change only a single source file, only it needs to be reloaded and rechecked, instead of having to reload everything.
This makes hdevtools very fast for checking syntax and type errors (runs just as fast as the “:reload” command in GHCi).
In fact, syntax and type checking is so fast, that you can safely enable auto checking on every save. Even for huge projects, checking is nearly instant.
In addition to checking Haskell source code for errors, hdevtools has tools
for getting info about identifiers, and getting type information for snippets
of code.
There are three methods to install hdevtools on Ubuntu 18.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install hdevtools Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install hdevtools using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install hdevtools
Install hdevtools Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install hdevtools using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install hdevtools
Install hdevtools Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install hdevtools using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install hdevtools
How To Uninstall hdevtools on Ubuntu 18.04
To uninstall only the hdevtools package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove hdevtools
Uninstall hdevtools And Its Dependencies
To uninstall hdevtools and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 18.04, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove hdevtools
Remove hdevtools Configurations and Data
To remove hdevtools configuration and data from Ubuntu 18.04 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge hdevtools
Remove hdevtools configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove hdevtools configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge hdevtools
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install hdevtools package on Ubuntu 18.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.
