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Helix Editor 25.07

helix-editor.com

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Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#111

Post by smohare »

_cwpi wrote: post #108
zem wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

surprised helix doesn't support the . key - is that incompatible with its interaction model somehow?

Yes, its model is that you make a selection and then act on it. After the action happens there's nothing selected. The editor can't infer your intent in making the selection, so there's no reasonable notion of repeating the last edit. You can separately repeat the last motion or last action, but not the whole edit---which of course isn't as useful. Helix would _ideally_ like you to tell it ahead-of-time everywhere yo…

The existence of a repeat or “magic” key is one of the more interesting developments alternative keyboard layouts designs. The use case is slightly different of course.

But as an extremely heavy user of vim repeat and macros for the last two decades, it strikes me as a wee bit audacious to so completely dismiss its utility.

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#112

Post by jcalabro »

ssernikk wrote: post #70
xmonkee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really really like it. I honestly think they should wrap it in a GUI with some conveniences like a mouse based file browser and it can compete well with vscode.

Zed has Helix keybindings now! https://zed.dev/

Have you found them to work well and be consistent? I've been a helix user for a couple years now, and I found Zed's helix keybindings to be inaccurate. Either that or I have some config options set that were confounding them. Curious how your experience with them has been?

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#113

Post by e12e »

ssernikk wrote: post #70
xmonkee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really really like it. I honestly think they should wrap it in a GUI with some conveniences like a mouse based file browser and it can compete well with vscode.

Zed has Helix keybindings now! https://zed.dev/

Not quite yet ...

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/33580

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#114

Post by infogulch »

Injections / nested tree-sitter scopes is neat. I guess this means it can highlight html template code where html, js, css and the template syntax all have highlights?

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#115

Post by zeendo »

mmcromp wrote: post #34
spapas82 wrote: post #28

Helix is great and includes a lot of stuff out of the box (file pickers, syntax highlighting, linting etc) without any configuration or installing plugins (contrary to vim or neovim). I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete…

For me, the issue isn't that I'm unwilling to learn new things. It's that I cannot use these keybindings anywhere else. Almost all online editors and workstations have some sort of vim keybindings. When I ssh into a Linux machine I can trust it has vim editor. It's like qwerty keyboard, I'm sure that there's better layouts but I just cannot discard the flexibility of being able to jump on most machines and be 99% pro…

To anti-pile-on to the other replies - this is exactly why I haven't given it much of a spin.

I'm glad to find out about evil-helix.

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#116

Post by burgerrito »

38 wrote: post #45
vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

Very nice to see a text editor that is very capable, yet still minimal and not focused on including a bunch of useless AI features.

> minimal https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/6187

Do correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't grammar files optional?

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#117

Post by usef- »

usef- wrote: post #104
mlry wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long forgotten the times back in the days during the Great Editor Wars when Emacs was shunned as an acronym for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". The youth of today ...

Emacs binary download page pointed me to Windows, but for comparison: 141MB: emacs-30.1-nodeps.zip 75MB: emacs-30.1-installer.exe (better compression? Contents seem similar) 27MB helix-25.07-x86_64-windows.zip So there's still an Emacs distinction, it seems (*not that these size differences matter in practice -- helix's "bulk" is all in compiled language grammars, each of which is not loaded unless you use the langua…

(replying to myself)

Alpine package sizes:

- helix 10.3MiB (+ 3 dependencies: musl, libgcc, sh)

- emacs 14.5MiB (+ 1 dependency: musl)

- neovim 18.7MiB (+ 9 dependencies musl, lua, tree-sitter, libint, libluv, unibilium, utf8proc, libuv, libluajit))

So it doesn't seem out of the ordinary for popular cli editors, if you're worried about smaller environments.

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#118

Post by eviks »

mmcromp wrote: post #34
spapas82 wrote: post #28

Helix is great and includes a lot of stuff out of the box (file pickers, syntax highlighting, linting etc) without any configuration or installing plugins (contrary to vim or neovim). I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete…

For me, the issue isn't that I'm unwilling to learn new things. It's that I cannot use these keybindings anywhere else. Almost all online editors and workstations have some sort of vim keybindings. When I ssh into a Linux machine I can trust it has vim editor. It's like qwerty keyboard, I'm sure that there's better layouts but I just cannot discard the flexibility of being able to jump on most machines and be 99% pro…

> I just cannot discard the flexibility of being able to jump on most machines and be 99% productive almost instantly.

You can easily discard it if you can become 200% productive with better defaults on your machine. Like, do you also not use any plugins just because they aren't available on another machine?

Also the keyboard comparison doesn't work since it's not as hard to copy your editor to another machine

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#119

Post by rgoulter »

latexr wrote: post #22
klaussilveira wrote: post #5

Very sad that Helix still doesn't have Sublime-like multi-caret support. All I want is to Ctrl + Click and Shift + Alt + Arrows.

Multi-caret support in Helix is awesome. It’s even the first feature they mention on the homepage. https://helix-editor.com You can `C` to extend the caret down, or `s` to enter a multiple regex selection. It even keeps your copied/deleted text per caret. I do wild things with it all the time, like changing a structured document into a completely different structure.

Indeed. Helix's multi-cursor support seems like a rocket-powered chainsaw to me.

It's powerfully expressive. IIRC, you can select a region (such as a whole file), split the selection into multiple cursors, retain only the selections which match a regex, among other things.

Re: Helix Editor 25.07

#120

Post by albus0x »

Great editor, switched from neovim and can't get enough of it. The software where I really exited about new releases. No issues for me, and only good vibes ahead. Thanks devs
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