evil-helix: A super fast modal editor with Vim keybindings

segmentation_fault@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 64 points – GitHub - usagi-flow/evil-helix: An experimental fork to bring the Helix editor to the evil side
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Some of you may have come across Helix - a very fast editor/IDE. Unfortunately, Helix has its own set of keybindings, modeled after Kakoune.

This was the one problem holding me back from using this excellent editor, so I soft-forked the peoject to add Vim keybindings. Now, two years later, I realize this might interest others as well, so here we go:

https://github.com/usagi-flow/evil-helix

I‘d be happy to polish the fork - which I carefully keep up-to-date with Helix‘s master branch for now. So let me know what you think!

And yes, I‘m also looking for a more original name.

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Nice! I started using helix before vim and often I find the helix bindings more logical (like shift for the reverse action e.g. u for undo and U for redo). However often the vim bindings feel quicker (c-i-w vs m-i-w-c). Will definitely give it a go!

At first I liked the new bindings, but later realised the Vim bindings felt more reliable and dropped helix even though I really liked the editor itself. This might make me try it again. Thanks!

Helix + vim => Helim => Helium?

Vim + helix => velix / vimix / vix / velimix?

Hmm, helium would‘ve been amazing, but that‘d be an SEO nightmare. My wife told me „velimix“ sounds like a kitchen appliance. Not sure if that’s a good thing haha…

I feel like helium works as well as helix. When I search Helix I don't get the editor but if I search Helix Editor I will get what I'm looking for.

When I search Helium editor I don't get any exact matches, but of course SEO is a dark and mystical art so your mileage may vary.

As someone that never really clicked with Vim, but has been enjoying Helix, I've been looking for the opposite: something that makes Neovim follow the selection-action paradigm, along with all of the Helix keybindings.

I feel the same way. I’ve been using helix for about a month now and really like its paradigm. But I’m missing some of the neovim features. And I’ve run into some lsp issues that I don’t think are present in neovim

Yeah. I hope as Helix grows more popular, our problems will solve themselves in both directions: where Helix can address them directly, and people start hacking Neovim to work more like it.

Out of curiosity: what issues with the LSP are you having and what distro do you run? I've found that most of my issues could be resolved by running Helix's health checks and making sure that the binaries needed by the LSP are available in $PATH.

Unfortunately, I did start having issues with Go where it seems like the LSP might be crashing and I've yet to resolve that one for myself.

I may have been wrong about helix being the cause of my LSP issues. One large typescript project I have will have performance issues but it may just be that project. I just found the same issue in neovim. Vscode is the only editor that doesn’t seem to have any problem with it.

I was originally hoping it would be resolved by this PR https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/10539