Earlier quoted context omitted.
111mb is bloat apparently in a time where storage is in the terabytes.
111 MB for a text editor is acceptable? I mean I get it, "we" are getting conditioned to it, but...
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Helix Editor 25.07
81–90 of 167 posts
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#82Congrats! I am happy for helix but i don't think it's a good fit for me. I use Neovim. It does what i want it to do. It's one of the best available options. But, i am not completely satisfied with it. I personally want an editor with following: * Modern codebase. Written from scratch. * VIM Keybindings: I have muscle memory of Vim. I would like to use Vim Keybindings in my editor. I don't want to use any other keybin…
> I have muscle memory of Vim. I respect the preferences of others but I think that most people overfit for muscle memory. I've switched OSes/editors/IDEs many times in my career. Every time, the first day or two I feel like "This is the worst fucking thing ever, I can't even type God damn it I want to set the computer on fire and become a farmer." But... that passes. After a couple of days, I have new muscle memory…
But there is only so much room for muscle memory or context to switch between. I tried Helix for a while, got used to it and I really liked it, especially the noun verb order being different from vim. Seeing what you have selected before performing the action. But for me the problem is that vim is everywhere I go or will eventually end up. All my servers have vim. Every server I need to randomly debug has vim or vi. So my muscle memory for vim keeps getting refreshed as well. And switching between the two constantly is just a pain. I could take along Helix to all these servers. But that is not practical nor do I need all the features Helix uses. Or I would miss specific feature which I then also have to bring along.
Now I’ve settled with Zed as desktop editor/IDE and still use vim on remotes. The context switch between a desktop app en cli is big enough that it’s never a problem. I don’t even use the vim bindings in Zed.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#83Helix is great and includes a lot of stuff out of the box (file pickers, syntax highlighting, linting etc) without any configuration or installing plugins (contrary to vim or neovim). I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete…
Same same.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#84Helix is great and includes a lot of stuff out of the box (file pickers, syntax highlighting, linting etc) without any configuration or installing plugins (contrary to vim or neovim). I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete…
I'm totally fine with (re)learning new tools, but having given Helix a solid try found the noun-verb model worse; the visual feedback is fun but distracting, particularly when you're moving around reading code. For it you give up things like repeating edits easily (bound as '.' in Vim). There's also a statefulness to Helix's model that isn't present in Vim; whereas in the latter I only have to care about where I _am_ in the file as I'm making my edit, in Helix I have to care about where I've _been_ because that dictates what I've currently got selected. See my other comment for details.
I want an editor with OOTB configuration and a modal editing paradigm (probably Vim's) that isn't constructed around visually synchronizing every edit action. Doing the latter means relinquishing what's good about an editing language, which is that you needn't actively think about edits so much. It's not about speed, but freeing up mental resources to think about the more interesting programming tasks at hand. Editors that demand more attention are doing a worse job.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#85Congrats! I am happy for helix but i don't think it's a good fit for me. I use Neovim. It does what i want it to do. It's one of the best available options. But, i am not completely satisfied with it. I personally want an editor with following: * Modern codebase. Written from scratch. * VIM Keybindings: I have muscle memory of Vim. I would like to use Vim Keybindings in my editor. I don't want to use any other keybin…
> I have muscle memory of Vim. I respect the preferences of others but I think that most people overfit for muscle memory. I've switched OSes/editors/IDEs many times in my career. Every time, the first day or two I feel like "This is the worst fucking thing ever, I can't even type God damn it I want to set the computer on fire and become a farmer." But... that passes. After a couple of days, I have new muscle memory…
i know many very smart people that insist that their muscle memory makes it impossible to switch editors or shells.
i respect the perspective of “i like my tools and have no reason to switch”.
what i feel is constantly missed if the understanding that your regular tools are literally one command away. learning something new doesn’t mean you can’t also take advantage of your muscle memory as necessary.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
111mb is bloat apparently in a time where storage is in the terabytes.
111 MB for a text editor is acceptable? I mean I get it, "we" are getting conditioned to it, but...
Long forgotten the times back in the days during the Great Editor Wars when Emacs was shunned as an acronym for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". The youth of today ...
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have muscle memory of Vim. I respect the preferences of others but I think that most people overfit for muscle memory. I've switched OSes/editors/IDEs many times in my career. Every time, the first day or two I feel like "This is the worst fucking thing ever, I can't even type God damn it I want to set the computer on fire and become a farmer." But... that passes. After a couple of days, I have new muscle memory…
But there is only so much room for muscle memory or context to switch between. I tried Helix for a while, got used to it and I really liked it, especially the noun verb order being different from vim. Seeing what you have selected before performing the action. But for me the problem is that vim is everywhere I go or will eventually end up. All my servers have vim. Every server I need to randomly debug has vim or vi.…
> But there is only so much room for muscle memory or context to switch between.
People can learn to juggle plates while riding a unicycle. They can play prog rock on two-necked guitars. A handful of keybindings is like a drop in the bucket for what our nervous system is capable of encoding.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Other editors, if the content is not on the screen, will not perform the undo action unless the content is actually visible. Really? What editor does this? Vim/Neovim definitely will undo the change with a single 'u' press, and every GUI editor I've ever used will undo the change immediately with a single ctrl+z.
Ah, thanks for the correction. I'm wrong on how common this is. I just tested CLion, VS Code, and Sublime Text. I thought all three behaved as described, but only CLion did. I wish it was more common though, I find it a lot more intuitive and clear on what's happening.
Just tried Goland and it works the way you describe. Emacs is immediate restore.
CLion and Goland are both JetBrains IDEs, so no surprise they use the same mechanism. FWIW, I like it and think it's preferable.
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#89Love helix. Lots of features are still needed, but it’s an excellent editor
Re: Helix Editor 25.07
#90Helix is great and includes a lot of stuff out of the box (file pickers, syntax highlighting, linting etc) without any configuration or installing plugins (contrary to vim or neovim). I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete…
For me, the issue isn't that I'm unwilling to learn new things. It's that I cannot use these keybindings anywhere else. Almost all online editors and workstations have some sort of vim keybindings. When I ssh into a Linux machine I can trust it has vim editor. It's like qwerty keyboard, I'm sure that there's better layouts but I just cannot discard the flexibility of being able to jump on most machines and be 99% pro…
i didn't find it to be a big issue because helix doesn't have different key bindings as much as it simply has a reverse grammar. If you think of vim as a language to manipulate text objects (which is what it is basically) everything is verb-noun, in helix it's noun-verb. There's a few idiosyncrasies but approaching it that way I got around pretty much immediately.