- cross-posted to:
- text_editors@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- text_editors@programming.dev
Helix does not aim to be a better vim / neovim. Thus, for example, there are officially no vim bindings and Helix follows the selection → action model. Helix is also a relatively new project.
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I recently gave it a try after seeing dessalines recommending it. It is pretty cool but years of vim muscle memory won’t go away so easily :D
In my opinion, users who already use vim are not the primary target audience of Helix. I see the target group more among users who want to switch from a “normal” editor to a modal editor. The selection → action model and the easier shortcuts probably make the switch easier for many. I personally don’t like vim at all because of the handling (purely subjective view). Helix will definitely not be my default editor but I get along much better with it than with vim or neovim.
When I first tried Helix, my main concern (that prevented me from getting too far into it) was not going from Vim to Helix, but the other way around. Vim (or sometimes vi) is a standard editor on almost any Linux machine, so if I am ever working on a server if a VM, I would need to know/use Vim keybinds. That made Vim a more useful tool for me to learn at the time, as I could use the skills both on my machine and anywhere else.
I don’t feel like this is true anymore. Many distros do not ship vi(m) anymore but only nano.
Seems like most rpm based distro still ship vi/vim and don’t default to nano.
Good to know. In Debian and Gentoo nano is the only editor by default.
Vim (or sometimes vi) is a standard editor on almost any Linux machine, so if I am ever working on a server if a VM, I would need to know/use Vim keybinds.
I understand the argument, but in my opinion it is used far too often and is not always true.
Not everyone works with servers on which they have no influence on the installed software.
And in the few cases where I had to work with servers on which I had no influence on the installed software and on which actually only vim was installed, I could always use sshfs or rclone mount without any problems so that the editor I used didn’t matter.
I agree, never understood why they changed a lot of basic shortcuts away from what vi/vim/neovim uses.
Been using it on all my machines for many months now. Replaced all my basic usage that I had of vim/neovim and all the attempted and failed customisations and plugins I had tried to install. It works very well for console editing any file I need to reach without being overwhelming with weird short cuts I’ll never be able to learn and with nice enough UI/UX that guides and teaches. Even better the integration with lsp allows to launch some project files and have the basics like go to definition kinda work.
Tried to learn vim for many years without being succefull in doing much more than just moving around and inserting/deleting text with the most basic commands.
It’s great for anyone that doesn’t want to go the vim route but still get a powerful editor to learn.
While I totally understand the struggle of learning Vim, I would still recommend it over Helix for the fact that most popular IDE support “vim mode” or “vim plugin”, making vim not only a text editor but also a popular workflow across development environments. I would totally try out Helix if the key memory isn’t only restricted to the Helix program
I am a fairly long time emacs user, used it as my primary editor and note taking app for around six years. I have a config large enough to warrant its own git repo separate from my normal dotfiles.
Before emacs I used vim for several years.
After really getting into Rust, I decided about three months ago to just take a look at helix and see what it was about… and I haven’t opened emacs or vim again since.
LSP and tree-sitter cover like 90% of what my old config was doing out of the box, and the kakoune inspired key bindings just felt so natural. I feel at home without the overhead of configuration paralysis.
Don’t get me wrong, helix has plenty of room to grow, but I’m excited to grow with it.
I’m still a fan of turbo, Nano on steroids
ever tried Micro?
Oh nice! Didn’t know about this.
I kinda like Helix, I just don’t really know what’s the point of it. Some of the Kakoune bindings are marginally better than the vim default but any efficency I might get with it I instantly lose when trying to re-learn things or getting confused when I hop on a vim terminal on an other machine.
Kind of the same with the editor, it’s like a ‘batteries included vim’ but I can just get that with a really light vim config and not mess up my workflow.
I guess it’s might be cool if you are getting into it as your first modal editor but even then, if you want to use other stuff or need to use some different tools getting a vim extension will probably be easier than getting a Kakoune one.
I sometimes play around with Helix and I almost always have a good time, but there are too many vim features that I have integrated in my workflow that there isn’t any good equivalent to in Helix. I use ex commands, the quickfix list, snippets, the fugitive plugin and just little custom commands and mappings that I’ve accumulated. I don’t see myself switching to any editor full time that doesn’t have a replacement for most of these features, but Helix is very nice and fun to use occasionally.
ex commands
Are these for scripting outside of vim (but using vim)? If so you can probably still use these with vim and helix for interactive editing. Unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by that feature.
quickfix list
<space>d(current file) and<space>Dopen a window of issues as reported by the current LSP which you can use to jump to the selected issue (with fuzzy filtering).snippets
Looks like there is some basic support for lsp snippets which looks like you can add your own but a wider issue for better snippet support is being tracked here. So not ideal yet, but will hopefully improve over time.
fugitive plugin
It does have git gutter support and the
:reset-diff-changecommand currently. And you can run git commands with:sh git ...though that experience could be improved. Staging changes is still pending here as is diffing changes here which look like there is work slowly being done on these.
So there are some workarounds for some of the things you need - and improvements being made to those that are missing. Might take some time for these areas to improve though and it depends on how you use those features as if/when things are good enough for your usecase.
There are many cases I actually prefer the quickfix list to an interactive picker:
- When working on a very large project, such as my $DAYJOB, interactiveness gets in the way more than it helps if you’re running a slow command (like greping a large number of files)
- You can use
:Cfilterto filter things matched in the quickfix list and:colder/:cnewerto navigate the history of the quickfix list without having to rerun the command - You can run ex commands on the items in the quickfix list, like
:cdo norm gccto comment the matched lines (with the vim-commentary plugin), run a macro with:cdo norm, or:cdo yank Ato put all the matched lines in thearegister for example. You can also do stuff like:cdo -10,+10g/re/pto print all lines matching some regular expressionrewithin the range of 10 lines before to 10 lines after the match. - You can put more things in the quickfix list than you can with interactive pickers, like
:Git diftoolto get diffs. Vim also has support for parsing the output of many compilers and linting tools so you can use e.g.:compiler cargofollowed by:maketo build the current project with cargo and get any build errors in the quickfix list.
In short, interactive pickers are better for browsing, but the quickfix list is better for scipting and holding on to data for longer without having to rerun commands, and can with some basic scripting be used for more things.
Afaik helix doesn’t have diff capabilities which is also a major thing missing from my git workflow.
I expect some of these things to make it into helix eventually, particularly git stuff, but I would be surprised if they add support for more weird janky vim stuff like the quickfix list and ex commands, which is a valid design decision, but they are also very useful tools once you get your head around them.
I love the treesitter based movement (allows to move to beginning/end of a function), and the jump list (list of the locations where the cursor went, cross files and easy to navigate… Vscode really misses this).
I miss a debugging experience at least comparable to Vscode’s with rust analyzer (ability to start the debugger on a single test case without having to look for the executable’s path) to be able to use it day to day. To be honest, competing with vscode is always going to be difficult
I want to like it but I just don’t… I hate that it has words selected all the time, doesn’t look clean and makes it all feel slower.
I downloaded it and it’s pretty good, but even as someone who only uses vim / nvim on a needs basis I’m not sure I have the willpower to learn these new shortcuts.
There’s also Lapce which will hopefully implement Helix’s editing model too: https://github.com/lapce/lapce/issues/281
Neat, but we already have good text editors. Vim/Emacs/… starter kits achieve the same experience. Perhaps Helix is more responsive than established text editors, but that’ll crawl to a halt as more packages depend on behavior you want to change.
Vim/Emacs/… starter kits achieve the same experience.
Which Vim/Emacs/… starter kit sets up the same keyboard navigation model as Helix uses? I think that it’s its main strength, the selection -> action approach, which is quite intuitive (at least for me once I’ve tried) is what really matters in Helix. The rest is just an addition, the one that makes it a quite competent and convenient environment to work with, but an addition.
Which Vim/Emacs/… starter kit sets up the same keyboard navigation model as Helix uses?
Emacs 29 supports tree-sitter out of the box if you’re referring to code navigation. No starter kit uses Helix keybindings yet afaik.
I think that it’s its main strength, the selection -> action approach, which is quite intuitive (at least for me once I’ve tried) is what really matters in Helix.
I saw the Helix demo video and that aspect feels like extra steps to me. Perhaps the wiki is poorly worded, but I can select a word, a paragraph, a line, etc. and then delete, change, yank, etc. it in Emacs. Although I also have the option to ignore that approach wherever appropriate. I don’t need visual help to delete the next word, Emacs can do that for me with one keybinding.
Starter kits for vim/emacs IMO are a band-aid on the fundamental problem with them - poor default settings for the majority of use cases. I do think that an editor that takes the out the box experience is sorely needed in the cli editor space that helix fills quite nicely.
The big problems with starter kits is they are more fiddly to install - often require you to
curl | bashsome random script. They tend to mess around with your users config files in ways that you don’t always expect. And they require you to keep up to date a large amount of plugins that sometimes end up breaking for various reasons. All of this adds some friction to new users.Yes less friction than creating the configs and fetching the plugins yourself as you need to in vim/emacs. But helix remove all that fiction by just including all people expect from a modern editor from the start.
So I think it does a disservice to discount it completely just because starter kits can do a similar thing after you manage to get them installed.
but that’ll crawl to a halt as more packages depend on behavior you want to change.
I am not sure what you mean by this?
Vim has
poor default settings for the majority of use cases
Huh? Anyone who knows vim is going to have zero issues with a default setup in just about any use case. That statement makes no sense.
Just because someone that knows vim can use its defaults does not make them good defaults with zero issues. Or else most people would not have huge amounts of config and plguins to change them.
Though I do admit that by majority of use cases was really more of the majority of people I see wanting to use it as a code editor.
I don’t know anyone that would want to use an unconfigured vim instance locally for editing things over vscode or similar editors. But helix? yeah I see more and more people liking it with out the need to edit any config file. The only real time I see people using vim unconfigured is when interacting with servers where it is more of a pain to get their configuration on them than what they need to do on the server.
