ionide

Ionide is a collection of open-source development tools designed to improve the F# programming experience across text editors. It began as a set of community-maintained editor packages for the Atom editor and later expanded to support additional editors, most notably Visual Studio Code, through a coordinated suite of extensions and tooling.

The core component is the Ionide-fsharp extension for Visual Studio Code, which provides comprehensive F# language support. Typical features include syntax highlighting, IntelliSense and type information, signature help, and code navigation such as go-to-definition and find-references. It also offers an integrated F# Interactive (FSI) session for quick experimentation, as well as formatting and lightweight refactoring assistance. The extension is designed to work with common F# project structures, including .fsproj-based projects and script files (.fsx).

Beyond the core editor integration, the Ionide project aims to streamline typical F# workflows by offering tooling compatible with Paket for dependency management and FAKE for build scripting, contributing to a cohesive development experience across editors. The tooling emphasizes cross-platform compatibility, supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux environments.

Ionide is maintained by a community-driven team and collaborators, with ongoing updates to keep pace with changes in the F# language and .NET ecosystem. It is widely used by F# developers seeking robust editor support and an integrated workflow for building, testing, and exploring F# code.

See also: F# programming language, Visual Studio Code, .NET ecosystem.