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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

#121

Post by kkkrist »

cloverr20 wrote: post #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 f…

I feel you. Vim has been such a staple in my dev life. So much that switching felt like betraying sweet uncle Bram ;-) And without the need to write typescript, I probably wouldn't have switched. But what made me stay even for non-typescript work were the little things, like the positions in the location and quickfix list being auto-updated while editing, being (feeling?) faster and more responsive, the saner default settings (server usage) etc.

Regarding lsp integration, it's just nice to have project-based instead of buffer-based auto-completion, auto-insertion of import statements etc. Definitely makes me more productive. Setting it up the way I wanted (non-obstrusive, on-demand) was a bit of pain though.

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

#122

Post by e12e »

darrenf wrote: post #92
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 feel like I am definitely not in the "most users" group here. > syntax highlighting ... IDE-like functionality > Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have. The most important features for me are the ability to navigate around and manipulate whatever's in the buffer(s) efficiently. I'm a 30 year vi…

In addition to the helix resource, you may or may not want to look at:

https://github.com/LGUG2Z/helix-vim/blob/master/config.toml

I think most of the "muscle memory" bindings there are a bad idea (helix is different from vim - if you don't want that, I recommend neovim).

As for "dd" - that would be (as indicated in your quote) select line, delete (yd) in neovim.

Similar for delete to end-of-line - the second form is probably the "most helix like" - in being somewhat discoverable and "interactive" v(isual mark) return (end of line) d(elete).

As for filtering selection through pipe, or reading command output - they are also different:

"!" in normal mode is "insert-output" (r! in vim), while pipe is "filter" - eg, after selecting three lines, hit "|" then input "sort" - and the selection is piped through sort.

As a long time vim user I agree that helix is alien - but I also think the change to selection-action is good for discoverability (the context menu, interactive feedback on multiple replace) - and makes more sense.

I still would like to see , and some "shortcuts" like "dd" (but I'm not sure what would be "best fit" in the world of helix for that. I don't think "dd" is a great choice.

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

#123

Post by mattrighetti »

wvh wrote: post #120

I have been trying out Helix for the last few months as part of my now 24 year quest to incorporate some form of vi into my daily routine. This time, it's looking good. What sets it apart are the (zero-conf) built-in LSP and tree-sitter highlighting, and the select-verb modal keybindings instead of vi's verb-object syntax, where you see what you're about to do before you do it. Some of the key combinations also show…

Zed is more aimed towards collaborative development at the moment, at least this is how it’s marketed on their website.

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

#124

Post by Voklen »

Accacin wrote: post #60
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 just can't see if ever taking off, if I'm honest. The people that use neo/vim are going to continue using it, even if Helix is better. The people who aren't yet using it will use vs-code and the few that do switch, well they might go to Helix but there's a lot of vim resources out there, so I'm not sure all of them will go to Helix. Honestly, language servers are a bit of a faff to set up, but that's tooling and it…

I've tried to make the switch to Neovim from Vscodium before but there was so much configuration for all the language stuff (and I'm not the biggest fan of Lua). But after seeing this post and installing Helix it's been pretty painless so far and I think this can actually help me make the switch. I am about to try some configuration for Rust debugging but that shouldn't be needed once they've got full DAP support. I use Neovim as my standard text editor so the navigation and bindings aren't a problem, lets see if Helix can make my IDE be in the terminal too.

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

#125

Post by thebeastie »

pg999w wrote: post #46
p-e-w wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like somewhat of a miracle that neovim has taken as much share as it has. It's not a miracle but rather a testament to how much Neovim improves upon Vim. The number of useful features, among them Tree-Sitter and LSP, that Neovim has introduced has ended what feels like decades of stagnation in Vim development. Now imagine an editor like Neovim, but instead of working through 30 years of cruft and legacy co…

> Now imagine an editor like Neovim, but instead of working through 30 years of cruft and legacy code, it's built from the start using modern software engineering techniques and incorporates such features into its core editing model. User inertia is strong. Neovim has its success because of its improvement, but more importantly, the keymap and config language is based on Vim7. Vim7 users can painlessly switch to Neov…

If by keymap you are referring to default key bindings then it’s extremely similar. I’ll definitely be giving it a whirl.

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

#126

Post by HowardStark »

least wrote: post #86
Accacin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't see if ever taking off, if I'm honest. The people that use neo/vim are going to continue using it, even if Helix is better. The people who aren't yet using it will use vs-code and the few that do switch, well they might go to Helix but there's a lot of vim resources out there, so I'm not sure all of them will go to Helix. Honestly, language servers are a bit of a faff to set up, but that's tooling and it…

> I just can't see if ever taking off, if I'm honest. The people that use neo/vim are going to continue using it, even if Helix is better. I would think that helix probably is better because I'm certain that the verb->text object paradigm in vim could be much better. It may in fact make more sense to do the 'text object' first like it seems to do in both helix and kakoune. But is it better enough for me to switch off…

While I was going through the effort to set up DAP support, I discovered [mason.nvim](https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim) which has been a game-changer for LSP, DAP, and linter setups.

There had previously been fragmented plugins (williamboman/nvim-lsp-installer was Mason's predecessor and is a good example) that solved the problem of installation and management for each of these. With Mason, I feel that the story for managing different language environments has jumped to be extremely close to VSCode's extensions.

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

#127

Post by marliechiller »

maxhille wrote: post #53

Quickly tried it out and feels quite good. Unfortunately I also have to use IntelliJ, where I use the Vim-Mode (IDEAVim plugin) and I would have a hard time toggling my muscle-memory multiple times a day...

does anyone know of any plugin which does the same as the IDEAVim plugin? I'd like to try this kakoune based layout in intellij for the same reasons but this is a bit of a blocker if I have to keep flipping between vim and kakoune bindings.

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

#128

Post by aussiesnack »

Acur wrote: post #37
aussiesnack wrote: post #21

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.

The language server should work by just having rust-analyzer in you path. You can check with 'hx --health rust'. It also only works on Rust projects, not single files. You have to open helix with the path to the project folder for it to work.

Yep thanks that does the trick.

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

#129

Post by polotics »

pg999w wrote: post #46
p-e-w wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like somewhat of a miracle that neovim has taken as much share as it has. It's not a miracle but rather a testament to how much Neovim improves upon Vim. The number of useful features, among them Tree-Sitter and LSP, that Neovim has introduced has ended what feels like decades of stagnation in Vim development. Now imagine an editor like Neovim, but instead of working through 30 years of cruft and legacy co…

> Now imagine an editor like Neovim, but instead of working through 30 years of cruft and legacy code, it's built from the start using modern software engineering techniques and incorporates such features into its core editing model. User inertia is strong. Neovim has its success because of its improvement, but more importantly, the keymap and config language is based on Vim7. Vim7 users can painlessly switch to Neov…

Based on my observation of colleagues' dominant usage of IntelliJ-originated editors, I think that modal-editors users are far enough from the mainstream that some rules dont apply: Heliy may end up dominant in our pocket-universe, based on merit alone.
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