| ▲ | MrJohz 7 days ago |
| Hey, that's me! I wrote this about a year ago, and I'm still using Helix, and still quite happy with it. The lack of a plugin ecosystem is sometimes irritating, but work there is slowly progressing. And I'm still not a fan of the idea of building the perfect IDE by composing different TUIs together and spending hours trying to get a perfect setup. But other than that, editing in Helix feels so fluent and fast that I'd really struggle not to use it if I went back. |
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| ▲ | gidellav 7 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Hi! I started using Helix about 1 month ago, jumped from Emacs, and I have to say that I really prefer this minimalist approach where I have just two tabs on my term emulator, one for Helix one for git/compiler/etc, and I honestly don't feel the absence of plugins, except for maybe a better find/replace symbols like in VSCode could be nice. Well, thanks for your article! |
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| ▲ | JetSetWilly 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I'd love to switch to helix from emacs - I really like the editing model when I have tried it. However I write a lot of clojure and the lack of a REPL in helix and reliance on using LSP for everything (which just isn't as good as repl integration) is a bit of a blocker. I hope their plugin system and embracing scheme for it means that some kind of REPL capability will be implemented and supported well. I hope that plugin branch is merged soon. | | |
| ▲ | makizar 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You might want to have a look at Matt Paras’s config. He’s been developping the plugin system using steel, his own scheme interpreter in rust.
To send things to the repl, it uses eval-buffer from the helix-ext.scm file. The integration and customizability is for sure not that of Emacs yet, but with the plugin system soon to be merged, we can hope to have a proper REPL and Parinfer implementation! https://github.com/mattwparas/helix-config |
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| ▲ | josh-sematic 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Regarding open files, <space>+b opens up a picker for the files in the buffer. There is also now a file explorer under <space>+e (little e for starting at workspace root, capital E for starting in the buffer’s directory). |
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| ▲ | MrJohz 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I've not actually used the file explorer much, but I've seen that it's there. I assume it can't do file moves or deletes, though? That's the one thing I really miss from file pickers in other tools, otherwise I find the fuzzy search approach really convenient. I should definitely use the buffer picker more, at the moment I use the gn/gb commands and it mostly works, but then I suddenly end up with too many open buffers and it's hard to figure out where I need to go again. | | |
| ▲ | josh-sematic 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah the file picker can’t do moves or deletes. Personally that’s a rare enough part of my workflow that I don’t mind doing it via the terminal. |
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| ▲ | spartanatreyu 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wait what?! There's a file explorer now! Just tried it now, it's not quite a file tree but it's almost as good. I have been checking in with helix every 6 months to see if the plugin system was finalised so I could use a real file picker and actually navigate through and explore the files in my project. That one thing has held me back from using helix. I'll probably give it another go for tiny projects where I don't need any plugins (e.g. in-line error annotations through LSPs, indent rainbow, in-editor color pickers, line sorters, etc...). |
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| ▲ | vthriller 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > And I'm still not a fan of the idea of building the perfect IDE by composing different TUIs together and spending hours trying to get a perfect setup. OTOH one could build distrib similar to spacemacs/lazyvim, then you could just start with that, and once you find one particular plugin annoying or lacking, you could swap it for something else, at least theoretically (I've never used those personally, so I don't know how hard it is in practive). Not so much with all the eclipses and jetbranses of the world. |
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| ▲ | srid 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is Helix good for Markdown-based note taking workflows? I suppose no, because plugin system is yet unavailable. |
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| ▲ | 1-more 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Home row layer select is extremely my thing too! |
