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Helix 23.10 Highlights

helix-editor.com

21–30 of 76 posts

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#21

I used Helix for a while due to its support for LSP out-of-the-box, which my Vim config at the time couldn't live up to. I switched back to NeoVim after finding LunarVim[1] which had everything I was trying to get setup in my own config. [1] https://www.lunarvim.org/

[deleted]

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#22
post #9
post #6

Release size is ridiculous, and they refuse to do anything about it https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/6187

$ du -hs /opt/homebrew/Cellar/helix/ 139M /opt/homebrew/Cellar/helix/ That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

is helix built on electron?

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what's wrong with people making their own text editors though? I know quite a few people who use Helix and they seem to really enjoy it. Doesn't sound worthless to me.

[flagged]

> you could give the latter just by bundling Vim with an init file and some plugins

> One in a million things exactly like it

> there are much easier ways to achieve a better result

Is there a particular vim/nvim starting point that you recommend?

There are a lot of tutorials out there, but the idea of bundling is not something I've actually seen done.

If not, then Helix is actually the easiest way for a user to get what it's offering.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what's wrong with people making their own text editors though? I know quite a few people who use Helix and they seem to really enjoy it. Doesn't sound worthless to me.

[flagged]

I don't see good things coming out from applying your own value system to the comment you wrote.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#27
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what's wrong with people making their own text editors though? I know quite a few people who use Helix and they seem to really enjoy it. Doesn't sound worthless to me.

[flagged]

> Can you quantify its worth?

Since you asked, I've been using it recently and it feels like a more responsive version of Neovim/Kakoune. It's a very good editor, I upvoted this article in the hopes that someone else would try it too.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#29
Smart tab is so… smart. I really admire how people keep coming up with creative features that immediately make sense and become table stakes right away. This applies to editors across the board. Couldn’t imagine living without command palette in VSCode, for example. Smart tab looks like something I’d be using constantly. Does anyone have experience switching from VSCode to Helix? I’m using a ton of different features of VSCode and for that reason keep thinking switching off it is hard. Debugging, keyboard shortcuts, command palette, multi cursor, all sorts of different languages, all sorts of different extensions (GitHub actions completions and checks, line wrapping that’s Markdown-aware, …), … it just does it all! The core downside is the reason I’m looking to switch: performance.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#30
post #9
post #6

Release size is ridiculous, and they refuse to do anything about it https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/6187

$ du -hs /opt/homebrew/Cellar/helix/ 139M /opt/homebrew/Cellar/helix/ That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Helix the binary is around 24M on my system.

Helix uses tree-sitter for rich language support. Tree-sitter's grammars are binary dynamic libraries compiled from some source code. Depending on how they are written and how complex they are, they can be anywhere from few KB to many MB. There's like 150 of them ATM. It's not exactly Helix's fault that some are unreasonably large.

Tree-sitter is a large part of what makes Helix editing experience so good. Unlike regex-based parsing that (Neo)Vim uses (or at least it used to, last time I looked) which often break in weird ways and make the editor very sluggish sometimes.

Helix official releases ship with all the supported grammars pre-compiled to give a convenient fully-featured user experience. It's entirely possible to package Helix without grammars, then compile selected few and so on. Some distros and individual users do so. Grammars compiled by distros / package managers can be re-used between other programs using Tree-Sitter, so could be packages as additional (possibly optional) dependencies.

Honestly 140MB for such a good editor is totally fine with me, but people who can't live with it have plenty of routes to take, like improving Helix integration in their package manager of choice.

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