Earlier quoted context omitted.
> minimal https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/6187
111mb is bloat apparently in a time where storage is in the terabytes.
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Helix Editor 25.07
121–130 of 167 posts
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#122I really wanted to like Helix, and for the most part did, but there is something about the way undo works that just feels incredibly wrong to me. What it wants to undo doesn't always seem logical and always undoes too much. I've lost work because of it in the past.
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Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#123This is great. I have been daily driving Helix for a few years now and every release has been really exciting. Still anxiously waiting on a plugin system, but that’s more of a bonus than a need.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#124I really wanted to like Helix, and for the most part did, but there is something about the way undo works that just feels incredibly wrong to me. What it wants to undo doesn't always seem logical and always undoes too much. I've lost work because of it in the past.
There are two things that consciously bug me about undo, * When you press undo, and the content to be undone isn't on the screen, it will jump your screen to the relevant section (good) but also with that same keypress actually undo the content (bad). Other editors, if the content is not on the screen, will not perform the undo action unless the content is actually visible. When I press undo in Helix, I'm always taki…
What happens if you can't fit all changes into one screen? Does it jump to a random /last edit but undoes all the changes?
By the way, I find this forced move rather annoying sometimes, especially when I want to jump back and forth (undo/redo) and this behavior blocks visual comparison by constantly shifting the view
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#125Helix is the most interesting editor I've seen in a while. Very sane configuration — my config includes just one line to change the default theme to something with more contrast. No "AI" shit pushed down your throat, and it takes the vim idea of applying actions to blocks of code, and swaps them around — you first select the code, and then apply an action to it. So you get visual feedback before doing the action and…
It looks very interesting and I'd love to support it, but editors that must be modal are difficult for me to use, personally. Editors that are not modal can be made modal, but can modal editors be made non-modal?
Modal editors can be (in principle) made non-modal by changing keybinds to combos that change modes behind your back, so you'll keep insert mode as your primary one. So strictly speaking, non-modal editors are the ones that force you into only one style
But not sure real editors are as capable since some can have adverse actions on mode changes (e.g. resetting your selection or changing undo stack etc)
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The editor is 10mb. It's the grammar files that are represent the bulk, and those are optional. And yes. Complaining about 100mb nowadays is ridiculous. You probably have larger logfiles sitting somewhere in disk doing nothing right now, regardless of your OS.
I know, I was talking about a hypothetical text editor being 100 MB (without grammar files). And those log files can be easily wiped or rotated (i.e. compressed, which can greatly reduce their size), as they should. You do not do the same with your other files, do you?
Why the down-vote? You don't rotate your logs? Thought it is commonplace. Rotating logs includes compressing old ones. Or are your log files actually over 100 MB? Why? What are you printing? Output of "yes"? :D
As someone mentioned, Emacs is over 100 MB, so it does not have to be hypothetical. That said, I use emacs (and vim) interchangeably and I have nothing against it. I have LibreOffice, too, which is also a behemoth, but so is Haskell with its modules that I see getting updated regularly. In any case, I still prefer KISS and the fewer bloat as possible.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> do you also not use any plugins just because they aren't available on another machine?
The vast majority of plugins don't fundamentally change how you interact with text.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
> do you also not use any plugins just because they aren't available on another machine? The vast majority of plugins don't fundamentally change how you interact with text.
So? Narrow it down to the most useful minority that do, the question still remains
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is the forum post that convinced me NOT to continue getting into Helix. It says all I need about the project health. And given the development since then, I am more confident that it’s a bad horse to bet on. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1840#issuecomme...
I've never used Helix and I likely never will, so I've got no horse in this race. But code folding, seriously? I'd be totally against it. It's yet another editor feature that ties your source code to tooling . It allows you to write too large and too many functions, while keeping the code readable to yourself . Source code should be readable (mostly) independently of tooling. It should be readable when printed to pap…
> It should be readable when printed to paper.
Why should anyone waste time targeting a dead use case?
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#130I'm a long time Vim user, and I really liked Helix when I tried it last year. On one hand, I very much like the cleanliness of the whole project. On the other hand, I'm one of those people who find AI assisted coding useful (not vibe coding, just auto complete, auto edit suggestion, possibility to select block and make it do change on it). This is why I eventually started to move to VS Code with Cody, despite being way more comfortable in modal editors.