The main thing I use a REPL for is playing around with defining/redefining functions and then using them in various ways, and the different syntax plus the weird :{ :} business made that tedious in GHCi. So I ditched it and just moved to the old-school C-style "edit a file, save, compile, run" cycle.
With emacs and haskell-mode, I just open a Haskell buffer, and C-c C-l (control-c control-l). This will reload that buffer into another buffer that runs GHCi, creating it if it doesn't exist and using the existing one if it does.
