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Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

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Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#11

Post by elromulous »

p-e-w wrote: post #10

I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they ar…

> I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run.

I hope this doesn't come off as flippant: I thought your comment was sarcastic at first.

While I love seeing newer / better software displacing the old and crusty, this seems a little unlikely, no? It seems like somewhat of a miracle that neovim has taken as much share as it has.

P.s. I'm hoping to eat my words one day.

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#12

Post by ratorx »

p-e-w wrote: post #10

I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they ar…

Do you have any specific examples of things helix does better than neovim?

I think the neovim implementation of LSP and treesitter is quite nice. It was not that polished when I tried it last, but I think once it becomes mature, it will be really flexible. Tree sitter specifically is still considered experimental, but I think the timeline for that to be better integrated will be significantly faster than it takes for any new editor to get a decently sized community around it.

The zero config part of it is nice, but I think you’d be competing with e.g. VSCode with modal bindings on that note. Vim/Neovim have always had a fairly steep learning curve, and I can’t see that aspect of it mattering as significantly, especially since I only see LSP/Treesitter support improving in neovim.

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#13

Post by luispauloml »

p-e-w wrote: post #10

I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they ar…

>Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have

I'd say that those features are useful for source code editing, not text in general.

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#14

Post by mbStavola »

coffeeblack wrote: post #9

Looks very interesting. But what do the “plans for a GUI” mean for the terminal version?

IIRC the plan is to migrate the core logic into a library that can be consumed by either a CLI or GUI. There were also some discussions of collaboration with the Neovide folks, something that I personally found very exciting as Neovide is an excellent Neovim client.

However this was last year, not sure what the current status of all this is.

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#15

Post by makapuf »

davidatbu wrote: post #6
nine_k wrote: post #2

From the description, the architecture is nicely modern. It's also interesting to see a project that seems young to already be version 22. What I tried to find and could not was some built-in language, more expressive than the one used to describe syntax highlighting. This means that extensibility is at best not a priority,

FWIW, the maintainers have been exploring various extensibility solutions. For e.g., I remember seeing a PR to allow a WASM-based plugin system, though I think it was abandoned because of the tradeoffs it posed.

Interesting, do you have a link ?

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#16

Post by senko »

p-e-w wrote: post #10

I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they ar…

> Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP.

Sadly, that achievement is compromised by having to call into unsafe code.

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#17

Post by RapperWhoMadeIt »

I am currently almost entirely developing in Go. And for that I have a highly customized Vim environment, which really took me a while to get to where it is right now (it works very well, thanks to the great 'vim-go' plugin). Nonetheless, I am starting to have to develop more stuff in other languages like js and Elixir, and I definitely do not want to invest all that time tweaking my vimrc to have all the IDE bare functionality that works so well in Go. I was starting to consider making the transition into neovim, but Helix sounds almost like a plug-and-play solution with sane defaults (which is exactly what I would like to have). Is it better that I go for Helix, or is LunarVim or AstroVim actually what I am looking for?

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#18

Post by isatty »

p-e-w wrote: post #10

I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they ar…

> Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have

The most important feature of a text editor is that it can edit text well. Vim is popular because it’s the best _text editor_ not because it has a bunch of plugins making it an IDE.

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#19

Post by tmdh »

senko wrote: post #16
p-e-w wrote: post #10

I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they ar…

> Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. Sadly, that achievement is compromised by having to call into unsafe code.

Unsafe code is not bad code.

Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

#20

Post by Version467 »

luispauloml wrote: post #13
p-e-w wrote: post #10

I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they ar…

>Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have I'd say that those features are useful for source code editing, not text in general.

I'd say that has been true in the past (and is still mostly true today), but I think this will change in the future. I have been using lsp+treesitter for markdown editing and it's been an excellent experience. It's still early days, but with treesitter and lsp being as universal as they are I've been seeing a lot of people just experimenting with what's possible.

So yes, they are essential only for source code editing, but it's quite exciting to see what they can do for general text editing.

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