Using Frege in Intellij IDEA

under construction

For those who prefer working in an IDE, there is special Frege support for eclipse. However, Intellij IDEA can also be set up to compile and run Frege code smoothly even though the support is much less advanced. If you would like to see better Frege support in IDEA, please upvote the Frege issue.

This page describes how you can

• edit Frege code with basic syntax highlighting and general editing support (commenting, search/replace, hippy-completion)
• automatically compile Frege code whenever you change a .fr file
• run Frege code
• run QuickCheck
• start the Frege REPL internally with your code on the classpath.

Prerequites

Make sure you have recent version of IntellijIDEA. Any 13.x version or higher should be fine. The free community edition is totally sufficient. Some basic knowledge of this IDE is assumed below.

Make sure you have a Java 1.7 SDK installed.

Install the following plugins from the JetBrains plugin site if you don't have them yet:

• the Haskell plugin
• the File Watcher plugin

First steps

Register Frege files as having the Haskell file type such that the Haskell plugin will do the syntax highlighting. Go to Preferences -> Editor -> File Types and add *.fr to the list of Haskell file extensions.