elm IDE (editor and elm-reactor browser)

Question

Hi I am looking for a split screen IDE for elm. Just an editor on one side and a browser on the other running elm-reactor. I know I can position vi running in a text window and a browser in the other window, but this takes time and is fiddly, I am always having to adjust and find these screens after watching a video. Is there a nice simple IDE that I can start up to do this. The online try elm site is good (http://elm-lang.org/try), but I loose my code when I leave the web site. Ideally I'd like to run elm-reactor with an online editor locally on my machine. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There is an Elm Plug-in for LightTable that you may like. The demo shows that you can have tabs for editing code and tabs for running the web browser, all within the LightTable IDE.

You could also set up the Atom editor to run a web browser in a separate tab. There is an Atom Elm Plugin which will give you syntax highlighting and Elm Oracle support.

There are a few online editors but these are really only good for small bits of Elm code, useful for testing and sharing small ideas, but not much else.

• Ellie - This allows the import of any public package, editing the html which wraps an Elm example, and links and forks of examples.
• elm-lang.org/try - As you mentioned, this does not allow sharing of code. It does, however, include a few non-core packages like StartApp
• share-elm.com - This site is now defunct This site has the benefit of being able to save code for sharing, or for loading gists. However, as of 2016-01-20, this has not been updated to Elm version 0.16, and it only allows you to import core libraries.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention ElmCast's elm-vim plugin for Vim, and elm-mode for Emacs, both of which offer syntax highlighting and Elm Oracle support, as well as integration with Elm build tools. They don't have a built-in web browser, but with a little configuration, you can certainly streamline your workflow.

Answer 2

...and there is an Elm Plugin for the sophisticated IDEs from Jetbrains like IntelliJ, WebStorm etc.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8192-elm-language-plugin

Most of them are commercial software but there is an open source edition from IntelliJ: IntelliJ Community Edition and also free licenses for education and OSS projects.

For just writing Elm I like Atom Editor with the plugins language-elm, elm-oracle and linter-elm-make.