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Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

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

#231

Post by smsx »

hamburglar wrote: post #229
exDM69 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keybindings are pretty similar, the paradigm change from verb-noun to noun-verb and the multiple cursor paradigm are bigger changes. I got used to it with my brief affair with Kakoune. The Vim muscle memory will be quite helpful and not a whole lot of unlearning is necessary. hjkl navigation and other familiar concepts are similar in Helix and Vim. Vim ci" translates to Helix mi"c. After the first key press (m),…

hjkl are definitely table stakes for a vim-ish editor, but I also can’t live without 0 and $. Making me move my hand over to find home and end misses the point of hjkl entirely.

I’m just learning helix, but I believe you can move to the end of the line with gl, and i’m sure there’s an equivalent for the beginning.

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

#232

Post by BanazirGalbasi »

dahfizz wrote: post #184
p-e-w wrote: post #10

I 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…

> Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have To you, maybe. The most important features of an editor for me, and for many people, is that it is stable, dependable, and ubiquitous. There is no way I am going to re-learn years of muscle memory for a "post-modern" editor. Cool and trendy is the exact opposite of what I want in my tools. What happens with the authors get bored and move on to t…

> Vim is available on ~every machine I could possibly interact with.

This is my exact reasoning for sticking with Vim. I use Neovim on my desktop, but I work with servers and have a homelab where I just want the greatest common factor. Nano is also an option, but just like you, my Vim muscle memory is embedded and I end up with :wq everywhere.

Is Helix cool? Absolutely. Will it replace [Neo]Vim? Not until it's installed by default everywhere, and that won't happen unless it has a compatibility mode for Vim shortcuts.

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

#234

Post by bee_rider »

elromulous wrote: post #11
p-e-w wrote: post #10

I 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…

> I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. I hope this doesn't come off as flippant: I thought your comment was sarcastic at first. While I love seeing newer / better software displacing the old and crusty, this seems a little unlikely, no? It seems like somewhat of a miracle that neovim has taken as much share as it has. P.s. I'm hoping to eat my words one day.

IMO it is not that surprising that neovim has had some success, in the same way that it isn't very surprising that SwayWM has had some success. They both have the benefit of, in many cases, being completely compatible with the tool they want to replace. Being almost completely compatible with the old tool, while integrating a popular new technology (LSP or wayland) seems to be the only way to win over users who already have a strong connection to their tools of choice.

My vimrc already has a bunch of configuration in it, I'll give Helix a try when it is able to parse that (so, probably never, I guess).

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

#235

Post by bee_rider »

p-e-w wrote: post #10

I 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…

I don't see it. If you want IDE features in a text editor, you can use VSCode, it even has vim bindings that are at least trying (with middling success) to match the originals. The addressable market for Helix seems to be (neo)vim users who aren't picky about keybindings and new users who want a terminal editor in 2022. So... on the bright side the developers can probably have one-to-one conversations with all 10 of these people.

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

#236

Post by bee_rider »

_k9eq wrote: post #117
p-e-w wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LSP will not become obsolete, it will evolve. The entire industry is rallying around LSP, and Microsoft is constantly improving the protocol. In "ten or twenty years" LSP will have become a required feature for every programming language and every text editor. It will be essentially impossible to replace it with any other technology because of the massive investment already made in the ecosystem. I can imagine Tree-S…

I can easily imagine a comment like this being written 30 years ago where "LSP" was replaced by "tags files".

I mean you still wouldn't use an editor without ctags support, right? That's just a bad smell.

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

#239

Post by chipotle_coyote »

p-e-w wrote: post #35
dmortin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Is there anything preventing other editors from integrating LSP and making it work out of the box without any configuration other than adding a language server?

What's preventing it is their existing codebases, mostly. IIRC, one of the first things Neovim did was throw out literally tens of thousands of lines of legacy code from Vim. Meanwhile, Helix can just add the `lsp-types` crate as a dependency and they're already a quarter of the way to making LSP work. The difference between adding something to a 30-year-old C project and a new Rust project is so massive that it can…

While the Mac-only editor BBEdit isn’t open source, it is a 30-year-old C++/Objective-C project, and BBEdit 14 added LSP support which is largely exactly what the comment you’re replying to suggested: install a language server somewhere on your path and BBEdit will find it and use it. It’s preconfigured for a couple dozen popular ones, and adding ones it doesn’t know about out of the box is usually just as as easy as filling in a couple fields in a dialog box.

I agree with you in principle, but in practice I’m not convinced this is an insurmountable hurdle for other editors.

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

p-e-w wrote: post #10

I 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…

[deleted]
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