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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

#181

Post by bsnnkv »

e12e wrote: post #122
darrenf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Always cool to see people share one of my repos in HN comments! I hope you're having a good Monday

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

#182

Post by mpalmer »

oefrha wrote: post #83
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…

> by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter support. > maybe just tell ... why people would want to use it? Apparently they did tell you, and you’re not interested. Fine, but what a pointless comment. Rob Pike will also tell you how he loves coding without syntax highlighting, which you apparently find useful.

It's not a "pointless comment". Why would someone want to use it every day over Vim or Neovim? The only benefit of Helix specific to LSP and tree-sitter is the ease of configuration, a mostly fixed cost. Then what?

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

#183

Post by packetlost »

Voklen wrote: post #178
psuresh wrote: post #149

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.

Yeah, it's a tool targeting developers. The language matters to a certain subset of people who don't throw their arms up and move on when they encounter a bug.

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

#184

Post by dahfizz »

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

To you, maybe. The most important features of an editor for me, and for many people, is that it is stable, dependable, and ubiquitous.

There is no way I am going to re-learn years of muscle memory for a "post-modern" editor. Cool and trendy is the exact opposite of what I want in my tools. What happens with the authors get bored and move on to the next shiny thing?

Vim is available on ~every machine I could possibly interact with. There is a vim mode in every single mainstream editor / IDE. My Vim muscle memory will keep me productive for the rest of my life.

IMO, making something slightly nicer to configure is never going to overcome the inertia of a project like Vim. The new editor would have to be like 3x better to convince everyone to make the switch, not 1.1x better in some specific areas.

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

#185

Post by nkozyra »

allisdust wrote: post #176
psuresh wrote: post #149

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.

If IntelliJ stuff were not GUIs and instead terminal apps I suspect that would be a pretty big performance boost, too.

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

#186

Post by oefrha »

mpalmer wrote: post #182
oefrha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter support. > maybe just tell ... why people would want to use it? Apparently they did tell you, and you’re not interested. Fine, but what a pointless comment. Rob Pike will also tell you how he loves coding without syntax highlighting, which you apparently find useful.

It's not a "pointless comment". Why would someone want to use it every day over Vim or Neovim? The only benefit of Helix specific to LSP and tree-sitter is the ease of configuration, a mostly fixed cost. Then what?

That would be a reasonable comment, and people have been discussing that in this very thread. The one I replied to is "I don't use autocomplete, so you didn't tell me what's good about this editor, except you actually did and I even acknowledged that". Pointless.

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

#187

Post by jerpint »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #170
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'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…

This was my same impression when trying out helix. Really nice and shiny, but all the shortcuts I've spent time creating over the years are gone and not easily reconfigured.

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

#188

Post by dahfizz »

p-e-w wrote: post #38
ratorx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a difference between having a "learning curve" and having to spend effort setting up things that work out of the box in another editor. Vim advocates generally claim that investing time learning the Vim keybindings pays off as saved time during later work. But that's not what's happening here. If LSP just works in Helix, and requires fiddling with config files in Neovim, then Neovim is wasting my time, not te…

This may be a factor for brand new devs, but everyone who uses vim already has it setup, by definition.

One time setup cost is a small factor in choosing an editor. Stability and ubiquity are more important IMO.

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

#190

Post by haarts »

jarbus wrote: post #171
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

I've switch from years of Vim to years of Kakoune and am now trying Helix. While annoying I find I pick up the right keys fairly quick. A week until I get decent productivity back and a couple of months tops to truly get the hang of it.

I find it immensely helpful that Kakoune and Helix _make sense_. It is also a great boon that there's visual feedback.

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