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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

#171
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'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. Do you have some supernatural ability to quickly (re)learn muscle memory for new keybindings? I’d consider myself a fairly advanc…

I’ve got the same question. One of the major reasons I invest time into vim is because it’s everywhere and so powerful. If I invested time into learning a different set of keys for an editor that isn’t always available, I wouldn’t be able to leverage that power and fluency all the time, and furthermore, would need to switch back and forth between vim and helix keys

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

#173
post #117
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can easily imagine a comment like this being written 30 years ago where "LSP" was replaced by "tags files".

[deleted]

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

#174

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 us…

Seems like we agree! I don't think there's much need for people happy with the existing Vim layout to switch, and Vim is still a very serviceable editor. My comment more spoke to my personal tastes around editors. :)

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does: - Rust is a systems-level language and requires developers to be experienced in order to create big software components. This usually leads to better quality. - Rust rewards putting effort upfront (e.g. error handling, Option , ...) leading to less bugs than more forgiving languages. - Rust uses zero-cost abstractions which enables efficient code. In other languages it's a lot easier to degrade your perf…

> and requires developers to be experienced Ah the old PS3 argument ;) We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that (developers) want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?

Rust isn’t easier for good reasons. Sony was just lazy.

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

#176

Does this 'written in Rust, written in Zig, written in Go' make any difference in the user experience? See this often nowadays.

For an editor? Makes a lot of difference. The day intellij ide is rewriten in non gc/dynamic language, there will be a noticeable improvement in performance and number of times the ide has to be restarted because it ate all the memory.

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

#177
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…

Man, I don't know what has happened but the spur for new editors has.been delightful. I have been using Zed for a bit since I made it into the closed beta, but it has been very nice to use. VSCode does the job pretty well, but it just feels more clunky to me, and I have hitches quite often. It is not bad, but I want something more performant while giving me the style of vim and emacs. Zed definitely has some rough ed…

RIIR doesn't scare me at all -- as a user, my experience has been the rust rewrites are usually high-quality improvements over the original. Ripgrep is legendary!

It is a huge accomplishment of Rust to enable the creation of better versions of lang-standing highly-optimized-C tools.

(Which inspired me to kick the tires a bit on the language; it felt like C++ done right to me. Being able to write threaded code w/o fear of data-races is very cool.)

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

#178

Does this 'written in Rust, written in Zig, written in Go' make any difference in the user experience? See this often nowadays.

Yes, because if it's a language I'm comfortable in, if there's a bug I can hop into the code and try fix it myself. I find this happens most often for me with Flutter projects to be fair.
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