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.
Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
21–30 of 321 posts
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#22Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be programmable yet, although the FAQ says there are plans for implementing a plugin system.
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#23I am currently almost entirely developing in Go. And for that I have a highly customized Vim environment, which really took me a while to get to where it is right now (it works very well, thanks to the great 'vim-go' plugin). Nonetheless, I am starting to have to develop more stuff in other languages like js and Elixir, and I definitely do not want to invest all that time tweaking my vimrc to have all the IDE bare fu…
Helix is a simple install, easy to give it a try and see what you think. For most people, there’s no configuration necessary to get started. I jumped through the hoops to get C++ tools in a variety of editors, and nothing was as simple as Helix for me.
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#24Super cool to see another competitor in this space. There's no support for tabs, I really hope it's coming and they implement them in the same way vim does. So far the buffer/window implementation matches vim (as far as I can tell), so I really hope the tab implementation matches as well.
If they could implement the client/server architecture of kakoune, then this would really best editor (for me). It's a shame each editor implements a different subset of all the features I like and I'm always choosing between them.
Edit: Looks like there's an issue for tabs: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2295 , doesn't have too much traction. I hope someone picks it up, unfortunately my rust sucks far too much to get it done in any reasonable amount of time.
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#25I 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…
> Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. Sadly, that achievement is compromised by having to call into unsafe code.
Have you checked what that unsafe code does? Unsafe code is not bad per se, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the naming of unsafe and many are of the opinion that it should have better been called something like trustme to clarify that the code must not be necessarily unsafe, just that the borrow checker doesn't fully check here, which for certain core algorithms can be necessary.
As long as the content of those blocks has been carefully checked there is no problem with using unsafe.
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#26I 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…
> Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. Sadly, that achievement is compromised by having to call into unsafe code.
Vim, being written in C, is 100% "unsafe code", so this doesn't bother me much.
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, the maintainers have been exploring various extensibility solutions. For e.g., I remember seeing a PR to allow a WASM-based plugin system, though I think it was abandoned because of the tradeoffs it posed.
Interesting, do you have a link ?
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#28See also Lapce, an editor also written in Rust although it's trying to compete more with VSCode rather than Vim. Also, RIP OniVim 2, it was great having been written in a similarly fast ReasonML/OCaml but the creator ran out of funding and had to get a job. A shame, it even had compatibility with VSCode extensions.
Lapce is looking really promising IMO. It's very fast, has single-click support for a few languages (Rust of course) and the UI is surprisingly complete.
Obviously there are still a ton of paper cuts but it's still very impressive and they are very welcoming of contributions.
The only thing that concerns me slightly is that they're using their own fork of Druid which was pretty much labelled a failed experiment by its primary author (though tbf he still seems to be working on it). On the other hand the UI mostly looks and works really well! I've only noticed a couple of niggles - misalignments, labels not linked to check boxes, ugly context menus on Windows etc. (and that last one is mostly Windows's fault).
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#29I 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…
Do you have any specific examples of things helix does better than neovim? I think the neovim implementation of LSP and treesitter is quite nice. It was not that polished when I tried it last, but I think once it becomes mature, it will be really flexible. Tree sitter specifically is still considered experimental, but I think the timeline for that to be better integrated will be significantly faster than it takes for…
Sometimes treesitter has problems. Indenting has gotten worse and configuration is a lot more complex.
I have the same config with some neovim / vim specifics and I find myself using vim more often even though the neovim features are "cooler".
I wonder if it will ever become "mature". It doesn't crash for that matter, but you have to keep everything updated constantly. Vim doesn't really have that problem.
Helix looks cool too, but I was looking for what it has that the others don't have and I can't figure it out. The website just makes it seem like it's cooler than the others.
Re: Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust
#30just started using this today and fell in love and hoping to replace my current main editor which is vscode with vim bindings.
I don’t wanna spend hours on configs so I really like its opinionated defaults