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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

#241

Post by alwillis »

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.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

It’s cool to have choices, but you wouldn’t be the first person to think a new editor is going to replace Vim/Neovim. Vim is literally on every Unix/Linux server; every sysadmin can count on it being there.

I’ve been super impressed with the progress of Neovim and the team behind it. It’s only at version 0.8 but they’ve done some amazing things already.

I expect Neovim will get to the “batteries included” stage with Treesitter and LSP; it’s not far from there right now. And there are several Neovim distributions (LunarVim, Nvchad, etc.) that have all of the bells and whistles included. Helix sounds like it’s similar to one of these Neovim distributions.

Again, Neovim gives you choices: you can configure and tweak it to your heart’s content if you want or you can get something pre-configured with all the goodies installed and configured. Or you can use it headless from a different frontend (VS Code, browser, etc.) if that’s what’s needed.

Perhaps the best thing about Neovim is how great it is for both longtime Vim/Vi users and brand new users who are ready to graduate from Notepad and Nano.

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

#242

Post by Protostome »

I'm a big fan of open source software and have tons of respect for any OSS developer, regardless of the software he/she develops.

But I have to say, as a developer who has been taking part in the OSS scence for the last 20 years, it is very strange to me that some developers feel obliged to indicate they wrote a piece of code with Rust.

If I'm a user, I care much more that this is a usable software than what kind of programming language was used. For all I care, write it in binary. Rust may be a great programming language, but it is only a mean to an end.

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

#244

Post by pornel »

cloverr20 wrote: post #62

I have not tried the editor itself, but one thing that puts me off is how some people are claiming its going to replace vim/nevoim and others by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter support. I am working as a full time developer for the last 4-5 years and I never needed to use auto complete (for long words C-x n is there) and the current syntax highlighting seems fine. Vim is working great for me and I don't f…

For a long time I had the same opinion (using Sublime Text with its plain same-file autocomplete). It's okay, but after using LSP for a while, I'm sold on it. It really is nicer, and I wouldn't go back to my pre-LSP times.

"Go to definition" and "Find references" is faster and more precise than grepping, especially for common function names. This lets me browse larger codebases, even if I don't remember their layout.

Being able to peek at actual types of variables is quite useful in Rust which has type inference. I can check types instead of deducing issues out of compile errors.

LSP support for like "Extract into function/module" are great for refactoring eliminating most of the busywork. Renames are also more reliable than find'n'replace, especially when I'm renaming because the name is ambiguous.

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

#246

Post by chatterhead »

Protostome wrote: post #242

I'm a big fan of open source software and have tons of respect for any OSS developer, regardless of the software he/she develops. But I have to say, as a developer who has been taking part in the OSS scence for the last 20 years, it is very strange to me that some developers feel obliged to indicate they wrote a piece of code with Rust. If I'm a user, I care much more that this is a usable software than what kind of…

Pretty sure the Rust nod is for the HN audience; not just a nebulous end user.

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

#247

Post by kazinator »

coldtea wrote: post #133
kazinator wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commenter stated clearly that they are not put off by what others use but their claims that their shiny new toy is going to replace everything in a couple of years. Those people are just trolling; trolls are off-putting.

> Those people are just trolling; trolls are off-putting. Trolling means saying something you don't believe in to start a ruckus/annoy people/make a flame war. People saying that an editor done in the spirit of vim can replace vim/neovim, since it has LSP/tree-sitter support (which translates to: since it, on top of what it inherently has, automatically gets auto-complete/lint/etc support for all kinds of languages)…

> Trolling means saying something you don't believe in to start a ruckus/annoy people/make a flame war.

No it doesn't; please don't make up word semantics to try to make people look wrong. It's childish and pointless.

A disruptor cannot be absolved of trolling by it being confirmed that they believe in their own statements; a good many trolls are invested in their message, not just in disruption activity.

> nobody stated that

The put-off person was relating experiences from elsewhere to which you have no access to be able to say that. But in fact, I think I saw very similar remarks in comments under this very HN submission.

Some people are put off by trollish OS/language/editor/hardware/whatever advocacy. And water is wet, and dogs bark.

> how some people are claiming its going to replace vim/nevoim and others by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter suppor

That literally means "the outdated shit you're using ain't gonna be here before long, now that we have this", which is trolling even by your definition that incorporates disbelief in one's own statements.

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

#248

Post by halikular »

smsx wrote: post #231
hamburglar wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there an alternative for g0, g$ and gj, gk? It will act on wrapped lines like they're separate.

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

#249

Post by [deleted] »

smsx wrote: post #231
hamburglar wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by cactus2093 »

Protostome wrote: post #242

I'm a big fan of open source software and have tons of respect for any OSS developer, regardless of the software he/she develops. But I have to say, as a developer who has been taking part in the OSS scence for the last 20 years, it is very strange to me that some developers feel obliged to indicate they wrote a piece of code with Rust. If I'm a user, I care much more that this is a usable software than what kind of…

I can think of several ways this is useful to know:

1. As OSS software, some users will want to edit the code and add features, and knowing what language it’s written in is a pre-requisite to doing that.

2. The developer community is an important factor in making OSS projects successful. If I’m going to take a chance on a young project, I want to know that it is set up to have a strong community and continue to be improved over time. If it was hand-written in binary or assembly as you suggest, there is no chance it would grow a popular community of developer contributions.

3. Like it or not, different programming language communities have developed around different values in how to build software. The Rust community generally promotes strong type safety that makes entire classes of bugs much less likely which is a plus to me as a user.

4. With editors in particular, the language it’s written in often leaks into the user experience. E.g. Emacs is written and configured in Lisp, Vim has a ton of legacy cruft in the C and vimscript codebase that can make it annoying to compile/install, annoying to build plugins for, and has made modern features like asynchronous tasks difficult to add, which was the whole reason for neovim existing. VSCode has plugins written in JavaScript. Knowing this project is written in Rust gives me some hints that it probably won’t share any of these similarities with these other editors.

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