- cross-posted to:
- text_editors
- cross-posted to:
- text_editors
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
@fleg @lukas I’m mostly a kakoune user, but when I use emacs for org mode I use meow-mode
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 | bashsome 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.
I am not sure what you mean by this?
Vim has
Huh? Anyone who knows vim is going to have zero issues with a default setup in just about any use case. That statement makes no sense.
Just because someone that knows vim can use its defaults does not make them good defaults with zero issues. Or else most people would not have huge amounts of config and plguins to change them.
Though I do admit that by majority of use cases was really more of the majority of people I see wanting to use it as a code editor.
I don’t know anyone that would want to use an unconfigured vim instance locally for editing things over vscode or similar editors. But helix? yeah I see more and more people liking it with out the need to edit any config file. The only real time I see people using vim unconfigured is when interacting with servers where it is more of a pain to get their configuration on them than what they need to do on the server.