Rewriting to Haskell–Automatic Formatting

This is part of a series:

• Rewriting to Haskell–Intro
• Rewriting to Haskell–Project Setup
• Rewriting to Haskell–Deployment

One comment in a pull request about code formatting was enough to convince us we needed a tool to solve the problem once for all!

We decided to go with Ormolu because it’s really similar to how Elm Format behaves. In particular, from the readme, among other things:

Implementing one “true” formatting style which admits no configuration.

and

Let some whitespace be programmable. The layout of the input influences the layout choices in the output. This means that the choices between single-line/multi-line layouts in each particular situation are made by the user, not by an algorithm. This makes the implementation simpler and leaves some control to the user while still guaranteeing that the formatted code is stylistically consistent.

To install Ormolu it’s enough to run the following:

stack install ormolu

Then formatting can be checked in CI with:

ormolu -m check **/*.hs

Or formatted with:

ormolu -m inplace **/*.hs

Also, plugins are available to automate formatting whenever a Haskell file is saved! In VIM it works really well: