Yi/FAQ

Installation

• How do I install Yi?

get it from Hackage. Configure, compile and install Yi as you would do for any other Cabal package.

• Setup.hs does not compile!

You need to use Cabal version 1.2.3. To make sure you use it, do:

   ghc -package Cabal-1.2.3.0 --make Setup.hs
   ./Setup configure ...

• Setup configure fails with

Setup.hs: Package yi-0.3 can't be built on this system.

It means that you have no UI package available. You need VTY or GTK2hs installed. Get them from Hackage.

• On Mac OS X if you get an error message similar to this:

yi: can't load .so/.DLL for: gthread-2.0 (dlopen(libgthread-2.0.dylib, 10): image not found)

then your dynamic library search path variable is probably not set correctly. You can set it (in Bash) using:

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib

(Adjust the specific path to your system. You can find the right location using locate libgthread)

• ByteString problems: Yi as of 27 January 2008 cannot use the most recent ByteString library (because of the regexp libraries) which is 0.9.0.4 - it needs a version like 0.9 or 0.9.0.1. You may have the correct ByteString library installed, but still see an error like:

Yi/UI/Vty.hs:342:48:

Couldn't match expected type
  `bytestring-0.9.0.4:Data.ByteString.Internal.ByteString'

against inferred type `B.ByteString'

In the second argument of `renderBS', namely `(B.pack str)'

In the expression: renderBS (styleToAttr sty) (B.pack str)

In the definition of `withStyle':

withStyle sty str = renderBS (styleToAttr sty) (B.pack str)

This is because versions of ByteString often aren't compatible, and in this case, the VTY library was compiled with a different version.

• I get

No instance for (RegexLike Regex B.ByteString)

The proper fix requires some more cabal features which hopefully come with Cabal 1.4. So long we have a workaround as described in this message.

For a more extensive explanation, see http://blog.well-typed.com/2008/04/the-dreaded-diamond-dependency-problem/

Development

• How do I install Yi for development?

Get it from http://code.haskell.org/yi while there are other repositories of Yi out there, this is the latest.

• What are some of the dependancies?

The development version of Yi currently requires Cabal-1.5.2, Crypto-4.1.0, fingertree-0.0, and utf8-string-0.3.1.

If you are on Mac OS X and are using MacPorts, then these will not be included in the GHC in that distribution. Many of the dependancies are in MacPorts (for example: ghc, ghc-devel, alex, and gtk2hs). However, you may have some trouble building with Cabal-1.5.2, since it is a development version of Cabal. To work around these issues, you might have to add the line "Build-Type: Simple" to the .cabal files in the above required packages.

Configuration

How to Configure Yi

You can find configuration file examples in the 'examples/' directory, or online at http://code.haskell.org/yi/examples/.

A good way to start is to copy yi.hs in your ~/.yi directory (create it if needed), and hack as needed.