haskell-language-server VS ghc-exactprint

The advent of language server protocol made possible the creation of HLS (Haskell Language Server), and there are plugins for many editors, such as vscode-haskell, that allow you to have auto-complete, auto-import, and automatic function signatures—also available to your editor of choice. The whole feedback loop of editing, compiling, and running is greatly improved.

HLS 2.3.0.0 is currently broken on Windows.

The Haskell community has been focusing on tooling and IDE support in the last several years. Haskell-Language-Server is a huge improvment, so the experience is probably much better than you remember, but it'll still be a while before it catches up with Rust.

static-ls is a low memory language server for Haskell that serves as an alternative to (hls)[https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server] with less functionality by using statically generated information. It is intended for (Highly recommend hls instead if you aren't having these issues):

I think the corresponding HLS PR is https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server/pull/3462, so it isn't landed yet but hopefully can be part of a HLS release before too long. (I'm not sure if it will make it in to the very next release because we're due one out to support GHC 9.6.1 pretty soon.)

If you're synthesizing code, beware that addAnnotationsForPretty will always add a preceding space, so it will break layout. The best approach I've found for synthesizing code is to construct an HsExpr GhcPs, use the GHC ppr stuff to prettty print it, and then parse that in order to get reasonable Anns for it.