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Helix 23.10 Highlights

helix-editor.com

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Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#61
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's not exactly Helix's fault that some are unreasonably large. But it is Helix's fault for including them all even if 99% of the users will never use them (like the linked Verilog issue illustrates)

What do you expect for an editor that promises all batteries are included.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#62
I like Helix, but I get annoyed by a really tiny thing. When you hold the left and right arrow keys, the cursor will go to the prev or next line once it reaches the beginning or end of the current one.

Which is completely fine behavior, to be clear. I just can’t deal with it. vim does not do this.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#63
post #62

I like Helix, but I get annoyed by a really tiny thing. When you hold the left and right arrow keys, the cursor will go to the prev or next line once it reaches the beginning or end of the current one. Which is completely fine behavior, to be clear. I just can’t deal with it. vim does not do this.

Which is 100% intended, as also in (neo)vim commands like f, t, etc only operate on the current line, while in helix they actually work and take you to that character, no matter if it’s in the same line or 400 lines later

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#64

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…

I don't have experience switching vscode to helix, but here are my 5ct regarding your concerns: Debugging works for some languages, though it's not comparable to IDEs like vscode. It's also marked as experimental https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html?highlight=Debug#sp... Helix also has multi cursor, but probably not as intuitive when you are coming from vscode. Helix supports many languages without configuration…

> Command palette - i don't know what you are using it for

Discovery!

No doubt, command mode in vim et al. is probably the most powerful thing. However, as with anything shell, it all has to be laid out a priori.

Command palettes are fuzzy-finding, allowing reckless abandon for hacking into them. Single-letter commands have to be remembered, productivity suffers. Fuzzy is pretty much just as fast and grows with the user dynamically. I'll look into whether Helix has that.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#65

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…

> I really admire how people keep coming up with creative features that immediately make sense and become table stakes right away. (…) Couldn’t imagine living without command palette in VSCode, for example.

Command Palette isn’t a VSCode invention. Sublime Text already had it.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#66
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ 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…

Neovim... regex parsing... uh?

https://neovim.io/doc/user/treesitter.html

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have experience switching vscode to helix, but here are my 5ct regarding your concerns: Debugging works for some languages, though it's not comparable to IDEs like vscode. It's also marked as experimental https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html?highlight=Debug#sp... Helix also has multi cursor, but probably not as intuitive when you are coming from vscode. Helix supports many languages without configuration…

> Command palette - i don't know what you are using it for Discovery! No doubt, command mode in vim et al. is probably the most powerful thing. However, as with anything shell, it all has to be laid out a priori. Command palettes are fuzzy-finding, allowing reckless abandon for hacking into them. Single-letter commands have to be remembered, productivity suffers. Fuzzy is pretty much just as fast and grows with the u…

Ah okay, then you want Space-? It fuzzy finds alle the available commands and shows you the keybindings next to it, so you can even search for keybindings.

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#68
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not exactly Helix's fault that some are unreasonably large. But it is Helix's fault for including them all even if 99% of the users will never use them (like the linked Verilog issue illustrates)

What do you expect for an editor that promises all batteries are included.

I'd expect it not to include dead batteries

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#69
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More popular editors expect you to click a button when you open a file in a given language to install language support, nothing insane about that, easy and also no waste

for tree-sitter? what button do you press in neovim or emacs?

:TSInstall

Re: Helix 23.10 Highlights

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's your workflow like for situations where you need to poke around in an unfamiliar directory and open files in helix?

There are a lot of nice tui s for this, but saidly helix does not support opening new files into an existing session :(

this is the big problem. I hope there's a fix for it someday.
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