TidalCycles for VSCode

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

Features

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

• Shift+Enter to evalulate 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

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"
}

Known Issues

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