TidalCycles for VSCode

Support for the TidalCycles in vscode. You can learn more about TidalCycles at TidalCycles.

Contributing

Interested in contributing? Please read the contributing doc for dev environment info and guidelines.

Features

This VSCode extension for TidalCycles is inspired by the commands from the popular Atom package:

• Shift+Enter to evaluate a single line
• Ctrl+Enter to evaluate multiple lines
• Ctrl+Alt+H to hush

Syntax Highlighting

In order to get syntax highlighting in .tidal files you must do two things:

• Install the Haskell Syntax Highlighting extension
• Associate .tidal files to the Haskell language by adding the following settings in settings.json:

"files.associations": {
    "*.tidal": "haskell"
}

Prerequisites

You will need to have TidalCycles (a Haskell package) installed before using this extension. If you want to produce sound, you'll also need to have SuperDirt running. You can find instructions to install TidalCycles and SuperDirt at TidalCycles.

Extension Settings

Take a look in the Contributions tab on the extension page to see what config setting options are available. Here is a more verbose explanation of a few of them:

GHCi path

Probably the most important setting. This is the path to ghci.exe on your machine. If it's on your OS PATH, then just setting this value to ghci will probably do fine.

Examples:

"tidalcycles.ghciPath" : "ghci"

"tidalcycles.ghciPath" : "c:\\path\\to\\ghci.exe"

"tidalcycles.ghciPath" : "/path/to/ghci"

If you are using Stack, you can enable the useStackGhci option and the extension will use stack ghci to launch GHCi.

Boot Files

This extension has a default internal bootup process to load the Tidal libraries into GHCI. If instead you wish you run your own bootup process, you can configure this extension to point to a Tidal bootup file on your machine, or use a BootTidal.hs file located in the first directory of your VS Code IDE.

• tidalcycles.bootTidalPath - path to a file that contains line-by-line commands to boot the TidalCycles Haskell package.
• tidalcycles.useBootFileInCurrentDirectory - when equal to true, the extension will boot from a file named BootTidal.hs in the first workspace folder

Examples:

"tidalcycles.bootTidalPath" : "c:\\path\\to\\file\\boot.tidal",
"tidalcycles.useBootFileInCurrentDirectory" : false

"tidalcycles.useBootFileInCurrentDirectory" : true

Hover / completion support for Tidal statements

This extension implements some code support features for Tidal specific statements, providing code completion and hover information.

You can set the detail level of the provided information through two configuration settings, one for the hover feature and one for completion:

"tidalcycles.codehelp.hover.level": "FULL"
"tidalcycles.codehelp.completion.level" : "FULL"

Available levels for both options are:

• OFF: Disables the feature
• FULL: Enables all available information
• NO_EXAMPLES_NO_LINKS: Only show command format, parameters and return value information
• MINIMUM: Only show command format information

Writing new documentation

Not every command is documented yet and the detail level of the documentation varies from command to command. The files commands.yaml and commands-generated.yaml contain the currently available documentation. If you'd like to contribute, please add new documentation to commands.yaml.

The easiest way to do this is by creating a new file and adding it to the tidalcycles.codehelp.commands.extra list. The files in this list will be read in addition to the defaults contained in the extension itself. This way you can start writing and using documentation without actually having to re-compile the extension.

For the format take a look at the existing documentation and the source code. Most fields support MarkDown syntax as well, so you can style them.

If you want to see how your documentation looks, simply reload the file by executing the tidal.codehelp.reload. Look out for error messages popping up and if there are none you should see your changes immediately.

Full Config Example

{
    "tidalcycles.ghciPath" : "ghci",
    "tidalcycles.evalCountPrefix": "Evals: ",
    "tidalcycles.feedbackColor": "rgba(100,250,100,0.5)",
    "tidalcycles.useStackGhci": false,
    "tidalcycles.showEvalCount": true,
    "tidalcycles.showGhciOutput": false,
    "tidalcycles.showOutputInConsoleChannel": true,
    "tidalcycles.useBootFileInCurrentDirectory": false,
    "tidalcycles.bootTidalPath" : "c:\\path\\to\\file\\boot.tidal",
    "tidalcycles.codehelp.hover.level": "FULL",
    "tidalcycles.codehelp.completion.level" : "FULL"
}

Known Issues

• The Eval and Copy and Eval Multi Line and Copy commands from the Atom package are not supported.