Notes on switching to Helix from Vim

Post by klaussilveira » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:00 PM UTC

mechanicum wrote: post #96

klaussilveira wrote: post #42

Helix still has no way to emulate Sublime's Ctrl + Click (placing multiple carets), nor Sublime's Ctrl + D (duplicating selections and creating a multiple caret for each)?

Cmd + click places multiple carets on macOS. Apparently – I never touch the mouse when I’m editing in Helix. I don’t know which modifier it is on other platforms. I’m not sure if replicating Sublime’s Ctrl + D is possible or not, but there are other ways to achieve every use case for it I can immediately think of. e.g. I think I’d typically be doing ` h` to select every instance of the symbol under the cursor, or usi…

Post by sodapopcan » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:36 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #167

sodapopcan wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, I definitely made some assumptions there, but it sure sounds the same based on the description. I guess `%` selects more than just the token? But ya, I'm way too invested in Vim to bother with Helix. I have years of scripts and plugins I've written. I can't even be bothered to switch to nvim (I tried once and was not fun).

“%” is a range operator standing for the entire buffer; so :%s just means to start a substitution on the whole buffer. Neovim will highlight what was previously searched for, in this case matched by the *, but that won’t actually affect the search command. The way :s works in Neovim looks like multiple cursors to me, but I’m not familiar enough with Helix to know what the difference is.

Post by f311a » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:52 PM UTC

ngrilly wrote: post #104

danslo wrote: post #80

I tried to switch from neovim to helix for a couple weeks, but noted down the following things that were essential to me and not implemented yet: - Code actions on save, for example adding Go imports: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/6486 - Fuzzy search with a filepicker like telescope+rg, seems to have been added earlier this year: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/11285 - Automatically updating b…

I have the same issue with Helix not watching and reloading modified files automatically, as I sometimes run external programs modifying those files (templ and sqlc are good examples). Curious about how experienced Helix users are addressing this.

    [keys.normal.space.f]
    f = "file_picker_in_current_directory"
    F = "file_picker"
    b = "file_picker_in_current_buffer_directory"
    "." = ":toggle-option file-picker.git-ignore"
    g = "global_search"
    e = "file_explorer"
    r = ":reload-all"
    x = ":reset-diff-change"
    w = ":echo %sh{git blame -L %{cursor_line},+1 %{buffer_name}}"

Post by eulgro » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

eviks wrote: post #190

eimrine wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not seen any unergonomic defaults in vim. Check your understanding of vim philosophy probably.

Check your understanding of ergonomics if you fail to see the obvious

Post by mackeye » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #172

mackeye wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in kakoune, this is ` p |reflow `. which is obviously not as simple as `gq`, but you can rebind this, add things like auto-reflow as you type, etc., rather trivially, and rebind them (and a lot of these types of tools come preloaded as bindable commands). it's some work to set up this type of thing (and it makes perfect sense to use e.g. vim to not need to do that), but i like the composable design, where i can write…

> i can write some configuration to hook a shell command to a bind is `reflow` a binary that comes with kakoune or something?