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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

#61

I gave it a try out of curiosity with Rust, which you might reasonably expect to be well supported. But it didn't start a language server. So I followed the docs to find out how and was none the wiser. A tad undercooked, I'd say.

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

#62
I have not tried the editor itself, but one thing that puts me off is how some people are claiming its going to replace vim/nevoim and others by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter support. I am working as a full time developer for the last 4-5 years and I never needed to use auto complete (for long words C-x n is there) and the current syntax highlighting seems fine. Vim is working great for me and I don't feel any reason to switch to others. Instead of bashing other editors, maybe just tell what makes your editor unique and why people would want to use it?

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

#63
post #47
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP And what happens in ten or twenty years, when both are obsolete? I don't really care, what technologies my text editor is built on top of, but I sure would like to be able to still use it for writing my memoirs when I'm old.

LSP will not become obsolete, it will evolve. The entire industry is rallying around LSP, and Microsoft is constantly improving the protocol. In "ten or twenty years" LSP will have become a required feature for every programming language and every text editor. It will be essentially impossible to replace it with any other technology because of the massive investment already made in the ecosystem. I can imagine Tree-S…

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

#65
post #12
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…

For me personally is better because it works out of the box and their built in features are most of the things I need, fuzzy finder for files in the project, opened buffers, LSP, syntax highlight, etc.

If you are an old vim/nvim user, you already know deeply your editor/ecosystem and your config file is very solid, you definitely won't like helix at least yet, you need to learn to do everything the helix way and not the vim/nvim customised way you build all those years.

So I will say that for developers that are starting using terminal editors, helix is a very good starting point, because of the built in stuff that it seems essential at this point in time for an editor to already have and that might be what helix does better.

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

#66
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…

Can someone elaborate on why Vim doesn’t work well on non-english keyboards. I use Vim occasionally using a Nordic layout but would like to know why English is superior.

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

#67
I've tried helix and it doesn't seem as customizable as neovim/vim. I also prefer neovim/vim's default keybindings much more. While I can't see helix replacing neovim/vim, I can see people using it, as it has defaults that could appeal to some people. It's also fast.

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

#68
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overestimating the likelihood that Tree-sitter is going to gain enough traction to be reliable for general purpose text editing. It's great for popular modern languages, but not for everything, and there's no fallback in Helix. I'm not convinced that's ever going to change.

Reliable? I trust Tree-Sitter's grammars a hundred times more than the underspecified regex monstrosities that power highlighting in other editors. Tree-Sitter grammars are unit tested, have usable primitives for precedence and associativity, and are generally far more predictable than previous highlighting systems. Also, name a language for which there is no Tree-Sitter grammar yet. The only remaining ones are so ob…

Python, Janet, Haskell, and Hare were the filetypes I remember either being unsupported or not working well. I need to be able to depend on basic language support from my text editor, even when I work with niche languages.

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

#69
post #66
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…

Can someone elaborate on why Vim doesn’t work well on non-english keyboards. I use Vim occasionally using a Nordic layout but would like to know why English is superior.

All the hotkeys are more accessible on English. Things like / are just one keystroke instead of two, and so on.

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

#70
post #66
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…

Can someone elaborate on why Vim doesn’t work well on non-english keyboards. I use Vim occasionally using a Nordic layout but would like to know why English is superior.

It's really not, so long as you map hjkl to the appropriate key sequence on your keyboard. Everything else is based on mnemonics, not locations, so I is just I.

Maybe some stuff might be quicker because it's on the first layer, but if it's so bad you can map those specific keys.

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