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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

#251

Post by halikular »

jzm2k wrote: post #191
haarts wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've switch from years of Vim to years of Kakoune and am now trying Helix. While annoying I find I pick up the right keys fairly quick. A week until I get decent productivity back and a couple of months tops to truly get the hang of it. I find it immensely helpful that Kakoune and Helix _make sense_. It is also a great boon that there's visual feedback.

Seconding this. I had used Vim for nearly 8 years and felt very comfortable with all the crazy tricks you could do with modal editing but I genuinely felt Kakoune's way of doing modal editing was an improvement so I committed to learning it and it took maybe a month to get comfortable with the new way of editing. I'm really glad I took the plunge because I'm a really happy Kakoune user and I can't think of anything t…

How does it improve on neovim? Seems to me like slightly different keybindings to do the exact same thing, you're not saving any keystrokes or fatigue as far as I can tell.

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

#252

Post by darkwinx »

tiffanyh wrote: post #222

Some interesting stats: - Helix has 624 open issues (1,103 closed) [0] - Vim has 1,172 open issues (5,518 closed)[1] - NeoVim has 1,258 open issues (7,496 closed)[2] - VSCode has 7,463 open issues (136,638 closed) [3] [0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues [1] https://github.com/vim/vim/issues [2] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues [3] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues

could you explain what you find interesting from this stats?

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

#253

Post by nine_k »

medo-bear wrote: post #75
nine_k wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking forward to seeing Org Mode implemented as a language server. It's unfortunate that such a great general text organization tool is locked into the relatively small Emacs user community.

orgmode is so not a markup language and cant be served via lsp. its a whole ecosystem built on top of emacs. short of rewriting it, implementing it fully in another editor would require a sort of virtual emacs machine running in the background

Typescript or Rust are also not markup languages, and language servers for them allow for many interesting, non-trivial operations, so the model is capable.

Ergonomic keybindings would be a challenge though.

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

#254

Post by dmillar »

kamaal wrote: post #142
rjzzleep wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think that the place where it could potentially really shine is when you have to do remote shell work. I don't know if you can specify the runtime folder but if you use it as a simple replacement for nano on old machines that don't have a proper editor this would be perfect.

vscode is very good at this, and is the primary reason why I even use it. Frankly speaking the vim/emacs lines are yet to catch up with this sort of thinking. vscode feels like you are editing on the local machine. The experience is seamless and feels magical.

It could be cleaner. My understanding is that you need different extension(s) to manipulate files requiring elevated access (e.g. sudo).

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

#255

Post by renox »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #111
renox wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have The most important feature of an IDE is to be easy to use, having powerful functionalities is important too, but that's goes after.. VSCode has nailed the first point. Wake me up when (neo)vim/kakoune/Helix has a "list of tab view" similar to VSCode..

What's a list of tabview?

VSCode has a vertical 'subwindow' on the left which list all the opened tabs. I call this 'a tab view/list', I don't know what's the real name.

Usually I have between 10 and 20 tab opened, so the tablist is very helpful for navigating between tabs.

Unfortunately (AFAIK) the 'fast' editors (vim, kakoune, etc) don't provide such feature. Some have a tree list but not a tab list :-(

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

#256

Post by kybernetikos »

dm319 wrote: post #200
exDM69 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They not only change the keybindings, they change the editor paradigm from a verb-noun model (dw = delete word) to a noun-verb (wd = select word, then delete) model. Multiple cursors also have an effect. It's pretty close to vim keybindings, but the paradigm change makes it incompatible with 1:1 keybindings. That said, coming from 15+ years of Vim, I was felt pretty much immediately at home with Kakoune, and dropped…

What do you think about beginning of line and end of line movements? Is it really home/end? Seems like a common movement to assign to far-away keys?

gh beginning of line

gl end of line

Both key presses are home row, and as soon as you press the 'g', you get a little pop up telling you about them.

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

#257

Post by aussiesnack »

dahfizz wrote: post #188
p-e-w wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between having a "learning curve" and having to spend effort setting up things that work out of the box in another editor. Vim advocates generally claim that investing time learning the Vim keybindings pays off as saved time during later work. But that's not what's happening here. If LSP just works in Helix, and requires fiddling with config files in Neovim, then Neovim is wasting my time, not te…

This may be a factor for brand new devs, but everyone who uses vim already has it setup, by definition. One time setup cost is a small factor in choosing an editor. Stability and ubiquity are more important IMO.

> One time setup cost is a small factor in choosing an editor.

Perhaps for you, but empirically for devs as a population, this is very clearly false. A large part of the reason for VSCode's near-takeover for new devs in the last few years is its frictionless setup for almost everything.

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

#258

Post by Casperin »

halikular wrote: post #248
smsx wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I opened helix to check it for you. Pressed `g` and had a little popup tell me that following with `h` = line start, `l` = line end, `s` first non-blank in line (plus ~15 other options).

My hx doesn't wrap lines, so didn't check `gj` and `gk`.

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

#259

Post by halikular »

Casperin wrote: post #258
halikular wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I opened helix to check it for you. Pressed `g` and had a little popup tell me that following with `h` = line start, `l` = line end, `s` first non-blank in line (plus ~15 other options). My hx doesn't wrap lines, so didn't check `gj` and `gk`.

If you don't wrap lines how do you write text?

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

#260

Post by bobbyskelton41 »

superkuh wrote: post #220

I don't understand why "in Rust" makes these irrelevant posts somethign worth of the HN frontpage. All it means is that you won't be able to compile it yourself unless you use a fast rolling distro or out of repository tools to get this month's compatible rustc with rustup or curl|sh, etc.

It sticks with the MSRV of Firefox, which is currently 1.61.
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