What non-IDE tekst editor do you use?

abbadon420@lemm.ee to Programming@programming.dev – 21 points –

(Graphical) IDE's are great for development, but they're slow to start and heavy to run. Sometimes you just want to take a quick look at an xml or dockerfile and you don't want to spin up the whole IDE for that.

I've recently rediscovered notepad++ for that (on windows), what's your prefered easy-acces-tekst-editor?

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Helix. Instant startup. Minimal configuration required. Has all of the killer features I want from an IDE anyway.

EDIT: I assumed people would just research this anyway, but a more complete list of features I enjoy from Helix:

  • very responsive
  • modal editing
  • declarative configuration file format (TOML, not Lua)
  • language server protocol
  • debug adapter protocol
  • written in Rust so I am more likely to be able to submit a PR if I need to

Some cons (all known issues on github):

  • no plugin API yet
  • inline LSP diagnostics are overly intrusive and can overlap your code
  • cold-starts the LSP when you start the editor, so you might need to wait for symbol queries in a large project

Helix deserves more love. Blazing fast, sensible defaults, good lsp support, vim-ish bindings. It’s really my perfect editor

You make a good case. I'll check it out

For anyone trying it out for the first time: If you aren't sure how to do something, it's probably hitting the spacebar in normal mode. That will bring up a list of shortcuts, including the debugging, file chooser, and actions (for the lip)

It's such a cool editor, but after decades of Vim motor memory I just can't seem to wrap my head around the cursor / selection changes. I really wish there was an option to just make selection work like Vim.