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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

#191

Post by jzm2k »

haarts wrote: post #190
jarbus wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seconding this. I had used Vim for nearly 8 years and felt very comfortable with all the crazy tricks you could do with modal editing but I genuinely felt Kakoune's way of doing modal editing was an improvement so I committed to learning it and it took maybe a month to get comfortable with the new way of editing. I'm really glad I took the plunge because I'm a really happy Kakoune user and I can't think of anything that I miss from Vim.

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

#192

Post by ziml77 »

I went into this expecting it to be another toy editor that someone was showing off. But no, this thing is legitimately impressive!

I had just been messing around with my neovim config because of that Leap plugin that was posted here. I decided to also install and configure the Lua language server because I wanted to try switching away from Vimscript for my init file.

Since that file was still fresh in my mind, it was the first thing I opened after installing Helix, and to my surprise it immediately showed me warning markers in the gutter and moving the cursor over the underlined symbol showed the langue server's complaints. I love that it just worked from having the language server installed!

Also while messing with neovim yesterday I was thinking about seeing if there was a plugin to show possible operations after pressing the leader key, like what you get with Spacemacs. I decided to try hitting the spacebar in Helix to see what happened and was impressed to see that it popped up with a menu showing how I could continue my input.

I'm sure I'll run into annoyances after using it for a while, but damn does this project leave an excellent first impression.

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

#193

Post by anthomtb »

Q-and-A wrote: post #33

Does anyone happen to know if there is a terminal IDE that more or less operates like the very basics of popular GUI IDEs? By this I mean has a file manager pane which can be manipulated by mouse, allows multiple open tabs which are selectable and closable by mouse, is generally mouse-aware with regard to cursor activity on the text, and operates as a regular user would expect (not modal)? The closest thing I've foun…

Can I ask why you would want such a mouse-aware terminal-based IDE? Because it sounds like an oxymoron.

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

#194

Post by betwixthewires »

I already use this as my daily driver for everything, especially writing code. Have been using it for a few months. It gets better with every release. I love it.

It's got a few quirks. Trying to navigate while in insert mode (I know bad habits die hard) will have you undoing a lot of unintended autocompletes unless you turn LSP off. Tab to complete is a must for autocomplete features, and it should never autocomplete in comments or a completed line of code.

So a little rough around the edges, but still wonderful to use.

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

#196

Post by vulcan01 »

dm319 wrote: post #195

One of the reasons I love n/vi/m is the ergonomic benefit of using keys that are close to your touch typing position. I'm a bit disappointed that beginning and end of line in helix are home and end.

You can also use `gh` and `gl` for start and end of line (and `gs` for first non-whitespace character in line). These options (among others) pop up when using helix and typing `g`.

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

#197

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

Even as a Colemak user, the ergonomic benefits of hjkl navigation are utterly lost on me. It’s left me stuck as an arrow keys plebeian.

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

#198

Post by davidatbu »

anthomtb wrote: post #193
Q-and-A wrote: post #33

Does anyone happen to know if there is a terminal IDE that more or less operates like the very basics of popular GUI IDEs? By this I mean has a file manager pane which can be manipulated by mouse, allows multiple open tabs which are selectable and closable by mouse, is generally mouse-aware with regard to cursor activity on the text, and operates as a regular user would expect (not modal)? The closest thing I've foun…

Can I ask why you would want such a mouse-aware terminal-based IDE? Because it sounds like an oxymoron.

Not OP, but I get their frustration. File browsing is not very amenable to keyboard based navigation IMO. I'm currently using fdfind through telescope.nvim as well as another neovim plugin for this, but I can easily see why someone would want to use a terminal based text editor, with a mouse based file navigation tool.

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

#199

Post by scblock »

I gave Helix a try last week and I think there are a lot of things to like about it, but until it supports soft text wrapping for prose documents it's effectively useless to me. I'm not going to bounce back and forth between neovim and helix depending on whether I'm editing code, documentation, or personal notes.

The comments on the open issue in Github are not particularly encouraging.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/136

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

#200

Post by dm319 »

exDM69 wrote: post #109
buf wrote: post #79

If people want to replace vim, they should not change the keybindings.

They not only change the keybindings, they change the editor paradigm from a verb-noun model (dw = delete word) to a noun-verb (wd = select word, then delete) model. Multiple cursors also have an effect. It's pretty close to vim keybindings, but the paradigm change makes it incompatible with 1:1 keybindings. That said, coming from 15+ years of Vim, I was felt pretty much immediately at home with Kakoune, and dropped…

What do you think about beginning of line and end of line movements? Is it really home/end? Seems like a common movement to assign to far-away keys?
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