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Comment by yfr | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing! Any idea if this is possible in vim?

Without changing the order of symbols, you can at least display some symbols as unicode with vanilla Vim. Here's an extract of my Lisp Vim config, which replaces lambda by λ :

  set conceallevel=2
  syntax keyword lispFunc lambda conceal cchar=λ

The best way I know to do it for Haskell is to use haskellConceal ( http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3200 ), it display unicode characters but left the underlying ASCII untouched.

There seems to be a plugin called unicode-haskell[1] for Vim. However, as I am obviously not a Vim user, I don't really know anything about it.

[1]: https://github.com/frerich/unicode-haskell

Seems I should've refreshed before posting (now deleted)! As you can see from the plugin file, applying the maps isn't all that complicated, though it certainly would be nice to have it built in. I'm not an emacs user, but I seem to recall using this feature before... anyone know if TextMate had this implemented?

Thanks this is exactly what I need, should make coding in functional languages a lot more readable. Actually it appears GHC supports the use of unicode characters for operators via packages and an extension[1], if it wasn't for your post I would not have discovered this, cheers!

[1]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Unicode-symbols

I wouldn't recommend using that one. There is a newer plugin [1] that uses "after" in combination with conceal syntax to achieve the same effect but without buffer hacks on load/save.

[1] https://github.com/vim-scripts/Haskell-Conceal

Haskell-Conceal also works a lot better than unicode-haskell: it doesn't erroneously turn "\n" into "λn", and it replaces :: with a single-glyph equivalent so that signature and definition line up nicely.

Having said that, I still prefer <- and -> to ← and →, at least on screen: those Unicode arrowheads are too small on all the fixed-width fonts I've ever seen.

Those arrows are indeed pesky. In my fixed-width fonts (at least at the font size I'm using), → (->) and ⇒ (=>) look the same.

https://github.com/ehamberg/vim-cute-python

Combining :abbr and conceal could indeed reduce quite a lot of verbosity from JavaScript for instance.

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