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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

#111

Post by stackbutterflow »

renox wrote: post #90
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…

> Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have The most important feature of an IDE is to be easy to use, having powerful functionalities is important too, but that's goes after.. VSCode has nailed the first point. Wake me up when (neo)vim/kakoune/Helix has a "list of tab view" similar to VSCode..

What's a list of tabview?

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

#113

Post by cloverr20 »

spion wrote: post #87
cloverr20 wrote: post #62

I have not tried the editor itself, but one thing that puts me off is how some people are claiming its going to replace vim/nevoim and others by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter support. I am working as a full time developer for the last 4-5 years and I never needed to use auto complete (for long words C-x n is there) and the current syntax highlighting seems fine. Vim is working great for me and I don't f…

When you say you never needed LSP, do you mean you've tried it and found no benefit to having it, or do you mean you're doing just fine without it? (Because its possible to do just fine without it yet still find significant benefit to having it). What LSP does for me is instant documentation integrated into the editor and getting constant feedback if you get it wrong (at least from a typechecking perspective). I gues…

I have tried using it few times but I didn't see much benefit of using it, I am mostly working with python/django/javascript/react and by now most of the common functions I already know, so I didn't see much use of it and tbh it felt a bit distracting to me when a big hover definition came when I am typing something.

The times when I don't remember how something works, usually I have to go the stackoverflow answers/documentation to read on how it works, maybe try it out a few times in the shell, before writing the code. For typechecking and errors I have been using ALE and it does give a warning if there's something wrong and this setup is working fine for me.

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

#114

Post by exDM69 »

I've used Helix for all my recreational programming projects (in Rust) for about 6 months and I've written about 10kLOC of code with it. Still using vim at $WORK for a variety of reasons (giant c++ codebase that does not easily plug in to clangd/LSP), but I might be doing the switch soon.

Installation was easy and the default configuration is good. Plugging in rust-analyzer still needed a line or two of config file editing, but that should not be necessary for very long. Hint: use `hx --health` to check that all the tools are properly installed and configured (it shows a matrix of programming languages and their associated tooling, with red/green check marks).

My Helix config file is about 5 lines long, but my Vim config is in the hundreds of lines.

I had very little friction coming from Vim and a little bit of Kakoune.

I particularly like the fact that all the important features are built-in and not half baked scripts with unintended side effects (e.g. opening a Makefile in Vim triggers a ftplugin script that messes editor-global config instead of buffer-local, with the default out of the box scripts).

Lots of people are requesting a plugin extension system, which is kinda understandable since every editor seems to have one. But I haven't had a need to add any kind of plugin, and it's easy enough to fork a shell for an external process if needed.

It's still rough around the edges, but good enough for a daily driver.

Thanks to everyone working on the project.

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

#115

Post by e12e »

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…

> Regrettably, Helix has inherited Vim's worst design flaw, namely being unusable with non-English keyboard layouts

How so? I find the default helix shorcuts to be generally quite close to "ascii text input" - that is: ctrl, shift, alt, a-z and regular punctation?

FWIW I work on a Norwegian layout on a Mac, which is rather horrible for programming and shell use (option-7 for pipe, shift-option-k+space for tilde (!?), shift-option-7 for backslash, shift/option/alt + 8,9 for brackets ...).

I do miss "leader" from vim/neovim - and autocompletion from buffer (when there is no language support, like configuration files).

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

#116

Post by rami3l »

I love to see that Helix tries its best to ensure an out-of-the-box experience, as well as to add so many interactive hints for key combinations (for example when you want to paste in insert mode with C-R it’ll immediately list a set of registers that you can paste from).

However Vim is much more to me. It’s not just an editor, but a keybinding that I can use not only in nain, but also in VSCode, in fish shell, and even in GHCi REPL.

How long would it take to make them all support (some reasonable subset of) Helix?

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

#117

Post by _k9eq »

p-e-w wrote: post #47
usrnm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP And what happens in ten or twenty years, when both are obsolete? I don't really care, what technologies my text editor is built on top of, but I sure would like to be able to still use it for writing my memoirs when I'm old.

LSP will not become obsolete, it will evolve. The entire industry is rallying around LSP, and Microsoft is constantly improving the protocol. In "ten or twenty years" LSP will have become a required feature for every programming language and every text editor. It will be essentially impossible to replace it with any other technology because of the massive investment already made in the ecosystem. I can imagine Tree-S…

I can easily imagine a comment like this being written 30 years ago where "LSP" was replaced by "tags files".

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

#118

Post by exDM69 »

aussiesnack wrote: post #21

I gave it a try out of curiosity with Rust, which you might reasonably expect to be well supported. But it didn't start a language server. So I followed the docs to find out how and was none the wiser. A tad undercooked, I'd say.

Make sure you have rust-analyzer installed, and check `hx --health` to see that Helix finds it.

Not sure if this is still necessary, but I needed this workaround in ~/.config/helix/languages.toml:

    language-server = { command = "rustup", args = ["run", "nightly", "rust-analyzer"]}
This should not be necessary when rust-analyzer is stabilized (may be already), but last time I tried it still needed nightly.

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

#119

Post by cloverr20 »

awestroke wrote: post #74
cloverr20 wrote: post #62

I have not tried the editor itself, but one thing that puts me off is how some people are claiming its going to replace vim/nevoim and others by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter support. I am working as a full time developer for the last 4-5 years and I never needed to use auto complete (for long words C-x n is there) and the current syntax highlighting seems fine. Vim is working great for me and I don't f…

Quoted post unavailable.

See I am not against newer tools, I am using a lot of newer tools myself like fd/rg. What I am against is claims like "Ths new tool will replace everything else that has been made". Let people decide what works for them and choose accordingly.

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

#120

Post by wvh »

I have been trying out Helix for the last few months as part of my now 24 year quest to incorporate some form of vi into my daily routine. This time, it's looking good. What sets it apart are the (zero-conf) built-in LSP and tree-sitter highlighting, and the select-verb modal keybindings instead of vi's verb-object syntax, where you see what you're about to do before you do it. Some of the key combinations also show a reminder menu, aiding the learning process, which is a nice touch over plain old vi which has zero discoverability. General performance is also very good, the editor feels a lot snappier than a fully loaded Neovim or Doom Emacs, or a monster like Visual Code.

I think there are plans to see if a graphical editor could be built on top of it, which would be an interesting project. As a new Rust graphical tree-sitter based editor, it would probably rival the upcoming open-or-not Zed editor by the Atom folks.

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