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Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

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Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#21

Post by weinzierl »

jvican wrote: post #17

I've fallen in love with Helix and now use it for everything. Moved from neovim and VS Code to Helix for the majority of my coding. For me, after trying the Lazy neovim plugin distro and being a long-time vim user, Helix fills a unique need: - It's beautiful (lots of attention to detail) - It's fast (meaning: at no point did I think Helix is slower than it should) - It's hugely ergonomic (each default keystroke reson…

All of this plus that with their approach of shipping an editor that is useable out of the box I feel a lot safer from supply chain attacks.

No matter if VSCode or (neo)vim, needing tens of plugins from almost that many different parties always made me feel quite uneasy.

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#23

Post by kgc »

ikety wrote: post #20
deadbabe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s true. Once you master Vim, your journey to find the perfect editor will have come to an end. For the rest of your career, you can rest assured you will be using some form of vim. But some people don’t actually want to find the perfect editor, they would rather stay on the journey forever, trying to master a new tool every few years. Sounds miserable, never knowing true mastery and enlightenment.

I use both helix and vim every day. After a while your brain just adjusts. It's like playing on playstation and nintendo for a long time. Eventually as soon as your hands touch the controller it switches to the appropriate mode.

What are your differing use cases for each editor?

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#24

Post by ikety »

constantcrying wrote: post #2

I think it is worth pointing out that there are "zero configuration" vim distributions, which come with the same ease/limits. Not to take away from Helix, which I think is a cool project. But I think it's greatest strength is that it can (and should) be more than a vim rewrite in Rust. It can actually get rid of the legacy parts of vim and redo the things which did not work and integrate modern features from the begi…

Zero config distros still require maintenance, and the chosen tools change over time. Helix is just Helix

Helix is actively inspiring Neovim to become a more comprehensive baseline. Which is freaking awesome. One day the ootb experience will be so good with neovim that few will care for these "zero config" distros.

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#25

Post by r14c »

ar_lan wrote: post #19

> I think what motivated me to try Helix is that I’ve been trying to get a working language server setup (so I can do things like “go to definition”) and getting a setup that feels good in Vim or Neovim just felt like too much work. After using Vim/Neovim for 20 years... I think this is catching me off guard. Especially in the past 5 years there are Neovim distributions that make this extremely easy to configure. I a…

That is surprising. I didn't have much trouble getting LSP working either in og or neovim. My editor config is fairly barebones by preference, so its not like I spend a lot of time editing my configs either. I will say, Lua is a lot more ergonimic than vimscript for a lot of things, but I appreciate that I can still use the old ways at times. Like ALE isn't leaving my config unless I'm forced to remove it for some reason.

I hope they're happy using helix tho

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#26

Post by lawn »

ar_lan wrote: post #19

> I think what motivated me to try Helix is that I’ve been trying to get a working language server setup (so I can do things like “go to definition”) and getting a setup that feels good in Vim or Neovim just felt like too much work. After using Vim/Neovim for 20 years... I think this is catching me off guard. Especially in the past 5 years there are Neovim distributions that make this extremely easy to configure. I a…

I've never used a distribution and LSPs are in my opinion easy to setup in Neovim and especially now with vim.lsp[0].

[0]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#27

Post by ikety »

kgc wrote: post #23
ikety wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use both helix and vim every day. After a while your brain just adjusts. It's like playing on playstation and nintendo for a long time. Eventually as soon as your hands touch the controller it switches to the appropriate mode.

What are your differing use cases for each editor?

My work setup is simply too complex and uses too many plugins to work in Helix as of now.

For all personal work and just quick text editing I use Helix. If I could use Helix for everything I would

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#28

Post by mariusor »

ar_lan wrote: post #19

> I think what motivated me to try Helix is that I’ve been trying to get a working language server setup (so I can do things like “go to definition”) and getting a setup that feels good in Vim or Neovim just felt like too much work. After using Vim/Neovim for 20 years... I think this is catching me off guard. Especially in the past 5 years there are Neovim distributions that make this extremely easy to configure. I a…

I'm not sure your implication of LSPs existing, specifically for vim, or in general, for 20 years is actually true in order that your questioning of Julia's skills to actually make sense.

As a similar example, I could never be bothered to install and configure any LSPs even though I've been using vim for more than a decade. The friction of doing that was always just a little bit higher than installing a full blown IDE when the work actually requires high level LSP functionality.

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#29

Post by lawn »

pheggs wrote: post #18
celrod wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use kakoune, and don't understand why helix seems to be taking off while kakoune (which predated and inspired helix) remains niche. Kakoune fully embraces the unix philosophy, even going so far as relying on OS (or terminal-multiplexer, e.g. kitty or tmux) for window management (via client/sever, so each kakoune instance can still share state like open buffers). A comparison going into the differences (and embracin…

I genuinely don't like the concept of the keyboard interaction in helix and kakoune, selecting things to modify them. I don't know what it is, but it somehow just feels much less satisfactory to me personally compared to the vim way.

The problem with that editing model for me is that it makes text objects much more cumbersome.

In Vim you can for example do "dap" to delete around a paragraph, but you cannot easily invert it ("pad") because 'p' is too common and is already bound.

You can also easily do the "select first" in Vim by first pressing 'v' to start a visual selection, so I just don't see the point.

Re: Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

#30

Post by rpearl »

ar_lan wrote: post #19

> I think what motivated me to try Helix is that I’ve been trying to get a working language server setup (so I can do things like “go to definition”) and getting a setup that feels good in Vim or Neovim just felt like too much work. After using Vim/Neovim for 20 years... I think this is catching me off guard. Especially in the past 5 years there are Neovim distributions that make this extremely easy to configure. I a…

I've noticed a number of moderately sized companies "standardizing" on vscode tooling. You can use other editors, but they'll have extra special support for vscode: default project format settings or special tooling for debug integration specifically in the form of vscode config, that sort of thing. Recommended plugin sets.

I also took pause at the claim that LSP was the issue. Neovim + treesitter + LSP feels... fairly solved at this point? It was definitely a bit rough 5 years ago, but it's pretty smoothed out now. Not sure where that opinion is coming from (and it feels at odds with everything else I've read from jvns, to be honest!)

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