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.
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I am a fairly long time emacs user, used it as my primary editor and note taking app for around six years. I have a config large enough to warrant its own git repo separate from my normal dotfiles.
Before emacs I used vim for several years.
After really getting into Rust, I decided about three months ago to just take a look at helix and see what it was about… and I haven’t opened emacs or vim again since.
LSP and tree-sitter cover like 90% of what my old config was doing out of the box, and the kakoune inspired key bindings just felt so natural. I feel at home without the overhead of configuration paralysis.
Don’t get me wrong, helix has plenty of room to grow, but I’m excited to grow with it.
I love Helix! It’s pretty much replaced Vim for me, which was previously my preferred editor for quick changes, as opposed to loading up VSCode for when I’m putting in some sustained work.
Helix required a small amount muscle memory change, but nothing major, and in return I have a text editor which, due to sensible defaults, is exactly the same on all of my devices. I don’t need to mess around with plugins (Vim plugins are fun, mind, but it’s kind of a waste of time if Helix meets my needs out of the box.)
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 | 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.
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?
