Helix - A modal text editor

Linux@lemmy.ml – 57 points – 1 years ago

Helix does not aim to be a better vim / neovim. Thus, for example, there are officially no vim bindings and Helix follows the selection → action model. Helix is also a relatively new project.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Differences-from

https://docs.helix-editor.com/title-page.html

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Neat, but we already have good text editors. Vim/Emacs/... starter kits achieve the same experience. Perhaps Helix is more responsive than established text editors, but that'll crawl to a halt as more packages depend on behavior you want to change.

Starter kits for vim/emacs IMO are a band-aid on the fundamental problem with them - poor default settings for the majority of use cases. I do think that an editor that takes the out the box experience is sorely needed in the cli editor space that helix fills quite nicely.

The big problems with starter kits is they are more fiddly to install - often require you to curl | bash some random script. They tend to mess around with your users config files in ways that you don't always expect. And they require you to keep up to date a large amount of plugins that sometimes end up breaking for various reasons. All of this adds some friction to new users.

Yes less friction than creating the configs and fetching the plugins yourself as you need to in vim/emacs. But helix remove all that fiction by just including all people expect from a modern editor from the start.

So I think it does a disservice to discount it completely just because starter kits can do a similar thing after you manage to get them installed.

but that’ll crawl to a halt as more packages depend on behavior you want to change.

I am not sure what you mean by this?

Vim/Emacs/… starter kits achieve the same experience.

Which Vim/Emacs/... starter kit sets up the same keyboard navigation model as Helix uses? I think that it's its main strength, the selection -> action approach, which is quite intuitive (at least for me once I've tried) is what really matters in Helix. The rest is just an addition, the one that makes it a quite competent and convenient environment to work with, but an addition.

@fleg @lukas I’m mostly a kakoune user, but when I use emacs for org mode I use meow-mode

Which Vim/Emacs/… starter kit sets up the same keyboard navigation model as Helix uses?

Emacs 29 supports tree-sitter out of the box if you're referring to code navigation. No starter kit uses Helix keybindings yet afaik.

I think that it’s its main strength, the selection -> action approach, which is quite intuitive (at least for me once I’ve tried) is what really matters in Helix.

I saw the Helix demo video and that aspect feels like extra steps to me. Perhaps the wiki is poorly worded, but I can select a word, a paragraph, a line, etc. and then delete, change, yank, etc. it in Emacs. Although I also have the option to ignore that approach wherever appropriate. I don't need visual help to delete the next word, Emacs can do that for me with one keybinding.