Are there any good F# text editors?

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+4 Q:

Are there any good F# text editors?

Are there any good text editors for F#?

Instead of firing up resource-intensive Visual Studio, I would like to know if there are any text editors that can pretty-format F# code.

I am just getting started with F# and learning through FSI.exe with Notepad is giving me so much trouble...

+3 A:

Any editor which will handle OCaml should handle F# -okay-. Mostly you just needs tabs. I'd recommend KomodoEdit, personally.

Tony k 2009-04-17 23:03:20

@Anthony, do you know what template I should start with? I don't see either F# or OCaml... I am not sure what other languages is a derivative of OCaml.

Sung Meister 2009-04-17 23:24:08

I actually just meant for having nice tabbing support. If you just start as a blank file, and then choose "View As Language", Erlang will provide some syntax highlighting on some keywords. Not a perfect solution - just a suggestion. (I'm using Komodo, not Kom.Edit, so I'm only assuming the View As Lang. feature is shared.)

Tony k 2009-04-17 23:39:50

Would it handle F# layout (i.e. indentation) driven syntax okay?

Pavel Minaev 2010-02-05 01:05:08

+8 A:

Check this out: F# Without Visual Studio

Jose Basilio 2009-04-17 23:03:23

Hmm. I haven't touched X/Emacs for like 5 years... Maybe I can check out VIM...(never tried it)

Sung Meister 2009-04-17 23:07:04

I decided to give VIM a try.

Sung Meister 2009-04-20 02:56:47

+8 A:

Not to be too much of a tease, but looking ahead, VS2010 uses a new rehostable editor component, you can hear some about it here: Hanselminutes Podcast 147 - The new WPF-based Text Editor in Visual Studio 2010 - Interview with a Dev

Anyway, this means that the F# editing experience in VS can, in theory, be completely decoupled from VS and hosted in a lightweight editor. Which means it's possible F# could ship a sample or something that's 'the VS editing experience' (tooltips, squiggles, intellisense, ...) without VS.

To be clear, we on the F# team don't yet have any concrete plans to ship such a thing, but the new internal factoring of VS and the editor and MEF and whatnot should make this easy to do (we've prototyped it over a weekend, and it mostly works). So hopefully look forward to cool things in the future.

Brian 2009-04-18 00:08:58

I think having the VS2010 CTP expire on 1 Jan was enough of a tease :P

MichaelGG 2009-04-18 04:44:51

I will be looking forward to it. But in the meantime, I will try out VIM.

Sung Meister 2009-04-20 02:56:11

+4 A:

Two other options:

SharpDevelop with F# plugin from Robert Pickering.
Visual Studio 2008 Shell with F# CTP

huusom 2009-04-19 14:31:48

One other option:

xacc.ide, a small ide that supports a bunch of .NET languages. But frankly, I haven't use it for a while since I'm really happy with Visual Studio 2008 (IntelliSense, interactive syntax checking, fsi, etc...).

Stringer Bell 2010-02-05 00:22:00

For notepad ++ someone made a file and put it up on the wiki:

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/commun/userDefinedLang/userDefineLang_Fsharp.xml

DrWiggly 2010-10-08 21:16:33

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Are there any good F# text editors?

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