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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

#141

Post by rjzzleep »

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…

I actually think that the place where it could potentially really shine is when you have to do remote shell work. I don't know if you can specify the runtime folder but if you use it as a simple replacement for nano on old machines that don't have a proper editor this would be perfect.

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

#142

Post by kamaal »

rjzzleep wrote: post #141
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…

I actually think that the place where it could potentially really shine is when you have to do remote shell work. I don't know if you can specify the runtime folder but if you use it as a simple replacement for nano on old machines that don't have a proper editor this would be perfect.

vscode is very good at this, and is the primary reason why I even use it.

Frankly speaking the vim/emacs lines are yet to catch up with this sort of thinking. vscode feels like you are editing on the local machine. The experience is seamless and feels magical.

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

#143

Post by sceadu »

kamaal wrote: post #142
rjzzleep wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think that the place where it could potentially really shine is when you have to do remote shell work. I don't know if you can specify the runtime folder but if you use it as a simple replacement for nano on old machines that don't have a proper editor this would be perfect.

vscode is very good at this, and is the primary reason why I even use it. Frankly speaking the vim/emacs lines are yet to catch up with this sort of thinking. vscode feels like you are editing on the local machine. The experience is seamless and feels magical.

You can use tramp in emacs?

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

#144

Post by eating555 »

exDM69 wrote: post #114

I've used Helix for all my recreational programming projects (in Rust) for about 6 months and I've written about 10kLOC of code with it. Still using vim at $WORK for a variety of reasons (giant c++ codebase that does not easily plug in to clangd/LSP), but I might be doing the switch soon. Installation was easy and the default configuration is good. Plugging in rust-analyzer still needed a line or two of config file e…

I think the fact that helix doesn't really need a plugin/extension system is beautiful. It means that it's simple enough to config yet still powerful. Helix smooth out the learning curve in this good way and I hope it won't become complicated and make learning curve as deep as vim/nvim.

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

#145

Post by ziftface »

plaguepilled wrote: post #107

Glad they had the nerve to diverge from the standard vim keybinds. (For those who like the traditional vim binds, I salute you, but I have craved an upgrade for a while now)

I wouldn't even say 'like', it's just that I don't see a big enough advantage to switch. I built up enough muscle memory over the years and while helix might be slightly better (I don't actually know how much better, but I tried it and the impression I got was that it was at most only slightly better), that slight improvement doesn't really make up for the cost, which is being really slow for a while until you get used to it. Also you're giving up all your plugins. Also, you're giving up universal support in pretty much every other editor, since there are vim bindings in emacs, vscode, visual studio, jet brains ides, xcode, etc.

Vim isn't going anywhere, so it just makes more sense for me to continue using it. Maybe for new people they could get into helix? I love that there's more options for people and I hope they can cross-pollinate ideas. But it's a hard sell to be honest.

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

#146

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

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…

> 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

I'm not so sure. I have been using vim for years and I still do, but in the last few years the majority of my use has been vscode with the vim plugin. I have seen the same pattern in many others.

Helix is right up my alley and I'm definitely playing with it. It's not a straight vim replacement for many reasons and it's also not yet a vscode replacement for me, but I'm very excited about it and I can absolutely see it replacing my use of vim sooner or later.

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

#148

Post by Myrmornis »

discreteevent wrote: post #108
isatty wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> the best _text editor_ Code is text. So it is good to have a very good text editor for manipulating it as text. But code is also very different from plain text. It is highly structured. When I think about code I think about it as some kind of syntax tree (call hierarchies etc) . I don't think about it as character buffers. So if I am programming and I can have something that supports good text editing but also good…

I agree with this. I have never been a vim/neovim/helix user, so there's little I can contribute here. But I have always used paredit commands as much as possible, in all languages, not just lisps, and that's still true now that I've switched to vscode from emacs. I'm curious whether any vim/helix editing operations are "tree-based" in a similar way to paredit, and also whether anyone's building a paredit-like editing system based on treesitter.

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

#150

Post by gsinclair »

gunnihinn wrote: post #84
mnsc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a nordic-layout user as well and whenever I look at the actual differences side-by-side I get reminded about how much easier it would be to code if I had all those symbols that close. https://www.farah.cl/Keyboardery/A-Visual-Comparison-of-Diff... And for me I'm pretty sure that this "remap everything and translate every tutorial" barrier is why I never have been able to get into vim.

I grew up with the Icelandic layout. When I started programming professionally I taught myself the en-us layout and stared using that instead. It is much easier on my hands and fingers; it really does show that the people who came up with the syntax for most of the programming languages in use picked things that were easy to type on a US layout and didn't give any thought to the rest of us.

I’d love to know what the result might have been if they gave some thought to the rest of you. And if a person is designing a programming language syntax, I don’t see why keyboards that are foreign, even unknown, to them merit much consideration.

BTW I really don’t think the en-us layout is actually nice on hands and fingers. All the programming symbols are a stretch. I now use Karabiner to make easy key-chords for all the symbols, e.g. f-j is ( and f-k is ).

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