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Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

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Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

#21

Post by lsllc »

dcre wrote: post #17
Lyngbakr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see. Would this come at a performance cost? (My only experience with GUI editors is VSCode, which feels sluggish compared to Helix.)

Not necessarily. Zed is designed to be very fast. Worth looking into. https://zed.dev/ Both VS Code and Zed have pretty comprehensive (and in the case of VS Code, widely used) Vim modes, so it would really be quite a lot like that.

+1 for Zed [running in vim mode]. It has best-in-class tree-sitter and LSP support (not unsurprising since Max Brunsfeld of tree-sitter fame is one of the founders).

Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

#23

Post by dcre »

k33st wrote: post #18

[dead]

For anyone interested, here is the issue about auto-reloading.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1125

Another example of a missing feature in high demand is the ability to pipe info about the current file (path, line number, etc) to a command, e.g., for a custom git blame command. Fortunately there is a PR for that and helix is easy to build from source.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/6979

Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

#25

Post by frankjr »

ldelossa wrote: post #22

All we want is a tree explorer :'(

That's probably not going to happen as part of the core editor (there's a long discussion about this somewhere on the bug tracker) but should be easy to add using the now work-in-progress plugin system. Scroll down to the Examples section.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675

Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

#26

Post by beyondCritics »

turboponyy wrote: post #15
leecommamichael wrote: post #10

> Most modal editors are terminal apps, I'd like to change that and implement a good modal GUI editor. That’s lovely, I’m doing the same. I’m using glfw and C++14 to build a vim-ish IDE. I never learned to love vim/nvim plugins, and make only basic use of macros and substitutions so that’s pretty much the feature-set. It’s very fun to build your own UI library.

The best graphical, modal text editor is Emacs.

Emacs is far from being modal though ...

Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

#27

Post by imiric »

turboponyy wrote: post #15
leecommamichael wrote: post #10

> Most modal editors are terminal apps, I'd like to change that and implement a good modal GUI editor. That’s lovely, I’m doing the same. I’m using glfw and C++14 to build a vim-ish IDE. I never learned to love vim/nvim plugins, and make only basic use of macros and substitutions so that’s pretty much the feature-set. It’s very fun to build your own UI library.

The best graphical, modal text editor is Emacs.

*with evil-mode.

There's plenty of things that Emacs does right, but evil-mode is far from ideal. Many plugins don't support it OOB and need special workarounds. Many others expect native Emacs keybindings and you need to manually add ones for evil-mode specifically. Nowadays I don't experience many issues with it, but this is mostly because my setup is largely static, and it took me several years of tweaking the configuration to get it in a state that's usable and intuitive for me. It's unreasonable to expect everyone else to have the same patience, so an editor with a _native_ modal UI can certainly improve the user experience.

Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

#28

Post by karthink »

beyondCritics wrote: post #26
turboponyy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best graphical, modal text editor is Emacs.

Emacs is far from being modal though ...

Emacs' keymap system is fully modal by design. This state machine is why it's possible to fully implement evil-mode (and many other modal editing UIs, like boon, lispy etc) quite easily on top.

Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

#29

Post by turboponyy »

beyondCritics wrote: post #26
turboponyy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best graphical, modal text editor is Emacs.

Emacs is far from being modal though ...

Emacs is whatever you want it to be, and it has wonderful modal editing packages such as evil-mode[1] - which surpasses the editing system from vi that it is based on - and Meow[2]

1. https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

2. https://github.com/meow-edit/meow

Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor

#30

Post by jhchabran »

turboponyy wrote: post #29
beyondCritics wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is far from being modal though ...

Emacs is whatever you want it to be, and it has wonderful modal editing packages such as evil-mode[1] - which surpasses the editing system from vi that it is based on - and Meow[2] 1. https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil 2. https://github.com/meow-edit/meow

Having used evil-mode as my main driver for years, I can confirm that it truly works as expected. Requires some setup though. I used https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs to do the heavy lifting though.
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