▲ | spapas82 20 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Helix is great and includes a lot of stuff out of the box (file pickers, syntax highlighting, linting etc) without any configuration or installing plugins (contrary to vim or neovim). I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete the character under the cursor or "d" to wait for the motion before deleting anything. When this does not happen I get confused and angry. I think this would be a problem with most people that are using vim; it's very difficult to change your habits especially since you can't ever escape from vim because of its ubiquity. Thankfully, some good people have released evil-helix, a soft fork of Helix which introduces Vim keybindings https://github.com/usagi-flow/evil-helix ; I tried it and it works great so I'll totally recommend it to people that have my problems. As a final notice, helix (and evil-helix) works great in Windows (cmd). No need to install rust or anything. Get the .exe and you're gtg. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | mmcromp 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For me, the issue isn't that I'm unwilling to learn new things. It's that I cannot use these keybindings anywhere else. Almost all online editors and workstations have some sort of vim keybindings. When I ssh into a Linux machine I can trust it has vim editor. It's like qwerty keyboard, I'm sure that there's better layouts but I just cannot discard the flexibility of being able to jump on most machines and be 99% productive almost instantly. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | cayley_graph 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'm totally fine with (re)learning new tools, but having given Helix a solid try found the noun-verb model worse; the visual feedback is fun but distracting, particularly when you're moving around reading code. For it you give up things like repeating edits easily (bound as '.' in Vim). There's also a statefulness to Helix's model that isn't present in Vim; whereas in the latter I only have to care about where I _am_ in the file as I'm making my edit, in Helix I have to care about where I've _been_ because that dictates what I've currently got selected. See my other comment for details. I want an editor with OOTB configuration and a modal editing paradigm (probably Vim's) that isn't constructed around visually synchronizing every edit action. Doing the latter means relinquishing what's good about an editing language, which is that you needn't actively think about edits so much. It's not about speed, but freeing up mental resources to think about the more interesting programming tasks at hand. Editors that demand more attention are doing a worse job. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | latexr 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As someone who used vim (and then neovim) for some two decades, I didn’t find it hard to adapt to helix, and now vastly prefer it. I did edit several modal behaviours but always stick to helix logic. Things like the multiple selections and LSP support out of the box make it super worthy, aided by its fantastic help that when you press a multi-step character it shows a little hint of possible next options, including your own custom actions. I do on occasion need to use bare vim setups, and while some commands have been remapped in my head, I still remember enough for quick edits. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | positron26 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Helix is adding a Scheme for programmable configuration. With programmability, you can have a lot more state and contextual behavior. We get this kind of fine-grained stuff in Emacs with repeat maps, transient maps, heuristic DWIM behavior, state tracking per-buffer etc. As LLMs lower the cost of having that 8th or 9th language, you can expect programmable tools to float up in the market. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | mi_lk 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Omg. Vim keybindings is the single blocker for me to try helix. It means that it's possible to add vim support for Helix but they don't want to? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | bestouff 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Same same. |