What has your experience using GPUI been like?
Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
11–20 of 77 posts
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#12I'm a fan. I was looking for something a bit more like a vscode experience with kakoune/helix style keybindings, but everything seemed to be either 100% terminal or vim-style. I was quite interested in https://lapce.dev/ also written in rust, but as I say, vim-style rather than kakoune/helix style.
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#13I'm a happy Helix user and I'm curious what the benefit is of this over terminal-based Helix?
In general, the benefit of a UI would be that you can draw things you can't draw when constrained to a grid of characters, and you can have interactivity you couldn't otherwise have. It would be more like VS Code or Zed but with the Helix editing model underneath.
(Worth noting one of the maintainers said only a couple months ago: "this is really far away right now as helix needs large architectural changes before writing a GUI is even feasible/a good idea."[1])
[1]: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/39#issuecomment...
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#14I'm a happy Helix user and I'm curious what the benefit is of this over terminal-based Helix?
In general, the benefit of a UI would be that you can draw things you can't draw when constrained to a grid of characters, and you can have interactivity you couldn't otherwise have. It would be more like VS Code or Zed but with the Helix editing model underneath. (Worth noting one of the maintainers said only a couple months ago: "this is really far away right now as helix needs large architectural changes before wr…
Ah, I see. Would this come at a performance cost? (My only experience with GUI editors is VSCode, which feels sluggish compared to Helix.)
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#15> 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.
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#16I'm a fan. I was looking for something a bit more like a vscode experience with kakoune/helix style keybindings, but everything seemed to be either 100% terminal or vim-style. I was quite interested in https://lapce.dev/ also written in rust, but as I say, vim-style rather than kakoune/helix style.
What's the thing that bothers you most in a terminal app like helix compared to a regular GUI?
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general, the benefit of a UI would be that you can draw things you can't draw when constrained to a grid of characters, and you can have interactivity you couldn't otherwise have. It would be more like VS Code or Zed but with the Helix editing model underneath. (Worth noting one of the maintainers said only a couple months ago: "this is really far away right now as helix needs large architectural changes before wr…
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.
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#18[dead]
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#19Not sure why would you use a GUI over the terminal, since it looks like a replica of Helix only using GUI components instead of terminal rendering.
Re: Helix-gpui: A simple GUI for the Helix editor
#20I'm a fan. I was looking for something a bit more like a vscode experience with kakoune/helix style keybindings, but everything seemed to be either 100% terminal or vim-style. I was quite interested in https://lapce.dev/ also written in rust, but as I say, vim-style rather than kakoune/helix style.
Have you looked at Neovide? It's very similar to this, a cross-platform Rust based GUI front end for neovim. Neovide is really quite nice; it's beautifully rendered.
My primary use case for Neovide (vs neovim running in Wezterm/kitty/Alacritty) is simply so I can Alt/Cmd-TAB to it quickly as I usually run with many terminal windows open and it's somewhat of a chore to locate the one with nvim in it, whereas with Neovide I have a separate app with an icon in the dock/sysmenu to switch to.