Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 321 posts

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

#161

Post by tambourine_man »

fordsmith wrote: post #138
wvh wrote: post #120

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…

Man, I don't know what has happened but the spur for new editors has.been delightful. I have been using Zed for a bit since I made it into the closed beta, but it has been very nice to use. VSCode does the job pretty well, but it just feels more clunky to me, and I have hitches quite often. It is not bad, but I want something more performant while giving me the style of vim and emacs. Zed definitely has some rough ed…

For the uninitiated: RIIR = Rewrite it in Rust

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

#162

Post by kamaal »

sceadu wrote: post #143
kamaal wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vscode is very good at this, and is the primary reason why I even use it. Frankly speaking the vim/emacs lines are yet to catch up with this sort of thinking. vscode feels like you are editing on the local machine. The experience is seamless and feels magical.

You can use tramp in emacs?

Tramp in all honesty was not that seamless, its just that these are great editors, but they were not invented in the context of the overall changes in how programming is done today. To me the biggest plus of emacs/vim is they make it easy to navigate and manipulate text, that's pretty much it.

Every other feature seems to be an after thought therefore is not subject to the same experience the modern editors have. They also have a huge learning and set up time, and can send you down configuration hell for lots of things.

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

#164

Post by flohofwoe »

psuresh wrote: post #149

Does this 'written in Rust, written in Zig, written in Go' make any difference in the user experience? See this often nowadays.

Technically no, but quite often they are easier to install and tinker with than C/C++ projects (for instance usually you just need to clone the repo and run either 'cargo build' or 'zig build', and it mostly 'just works' no matter the platform).

Some C/C++ projects which have switched to cmake are equally easy to build (well not quite: "mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && cmake --build ."), but it's definitely not the norm.

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

#165

Post by willeum »

Tried it a few months ago

Felt more responsive than neovim/neovide, and out-of-box was great.

However, while the selection > verb scheme conceptually made sense, I noticed it took longer to do many basic text editing functions than it would with vim bindings. Perhaps others had a different experience?

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

#166

Post by davidkunz »

psuresh wrote: post #149

Does this 'written in Rust, written in Zig, written in Go' make any difference in the user experience? See this often nowadays.

Yes it does:

- Rust is a systems-level language and requires developers to be experienced in order to create big software components. This usually leads to better quality.

- Rust rewards putting effort upfront (e.g. error handling, Option, ...) leading to less bugs than more forgiving languages.

- Rust uses zero-cost abstractions which enables efficient code. In other languages it's a lot easier to degrade your performance by accident.

- Rust can easily create binaries for the most relevant architectures, so your programs tend to be portable.

- The contribution story is great, your code tends to be correct and you don't need to watch out for many foot guns. I've done it myself for Helix and the experience was awesome [1].

But take everything with a grain of salt, you can create bad software in every programming language.

[1]: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/1967

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

#167

Post by flohofwoe »

davidkunz wrote: post #166
psuresh wrote: post #149

Does this 'written in Rust, written in Zig, written in Go' make any difference in the user experience? See this often nowadays.

Yes it does: - Rust is a systems-level language and requires developers to be experienced in order to create big software components. This usually leads to better quality. - Rust rewards putting effort upfront (e.g. error handling, Option , ...) leading to less bugs than more forgiving languages. - Rust uses zero-cost abstractions which enables efficient code. In other languages it's a lot easier to degrade your perf…

> and requires developers to be experienced

Ah the old PS3 argument ;)

    We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that (developers) want, because
    ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty
    much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the
    rest of the nine-and-a-half years?

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

#168

Post by darrenf »

fgeiger wrote: post #151
darrenf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. I feel like I am definitely not in the "most users" group here. > syntax highlighting ... IDE-like functionality > Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have. The most important features for me are the ability to navigate around and manipulate whatever's in the buffer(s) efficiently. I'm a 30 year vi…

Two out of three examples for sequences that you provide are not shorter in vim. At least on my (US) keyboard, typing `^` takes two key presses (Shift + 6), as does typing `gs`. The same is true for typing `$` (Shift + 4) and `gl`. When reading the migration guide as a decade long vim user, I actually found myself to think that some sequences in Helix are improvements over the ones in vim. For instance, `gs` is easie…

I don't think I'd agree that two simultaneous keypresses is equivalent to two in sequence. But besides which, `^` and `$` are so ingrained with meaning to this grumpy old Perl coder that abandoning them is an extremely hard sell. Perhaps I'd be OK with `\A` and `\z`.

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

#169

Post by ufo »

xigoi wrote: post #22

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be programmable yet, although the FAQ says there are plans for implementing a plugin system.

The FAQ currently mentions that they're planning on implementing a LISP dialect. I wonder why they chose that instead of an existing language (e.g. Lua, Tcl, or Guile)

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

#170

Post by MontyCarloHall »

exDM69 wrote: post #114

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 e…

>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.

Do you have some supernatural ability to quickly (re)learn muscle memory for new keybindings? I’d consider myself a fairly advanced vim user, and it took me literally a couple years to get to the point of fluently using complex navigation/editing commands.

I took a look at the Helix documentation, and while it’s definitely “vim inspired,” it’s different enough [0] that I would have to rewire years of muscle memory to be as productive as I am in vim. There are some very fundamental differences, e.g. the verb/object syntax is reversed in Helix; `dw` in vim is `wd` in Helix. When I want to rewrite a string in vim, I unconsciously type `ci"`; it would take me a long time with Helix to regain that level of fluency.

[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Migrating-from-Vi...

Post reply on HN