Helix Text Editor: Better than Neovim?

In this video, we're gonna have a first look at Helix, a terminal-based text editor similar to Vim and Kakoune.

Contact:

#helix

[ZmejBlazeIt]

glad people are building new editors from scratch and trying to innovate. personally i'll stick to (neo)vim. worked for the past 10 years and itll work for the next ten. kinda like how I still use my dads 30 year old electric drill.

[Flackon]

This has a lot of promise. I hope the community around it grows steadily

[lamprospitsillou]

I was asking for such a video for months now, couldn't have asked for a better video! Thank you

[matthias]

I like Helix because it's more than a text editor: It comes with LSP, Debugging, fuzzy finder/telescope, tree-sitter etc. out of the box.
Furthermore is is written from the ground up, which means we don't need a wrapper language (e.g. Lua) like in Neovim, where we have to deal with VimScript etc.

The philosophy of selection-first or action-follows-selection appeals to me as well. However I noticed I'm used so much to vim bindings, that I don't need visual selection before an action most of the time.

Overall great project and very nice to see a video on your channel about it. Let's hope they will implement an API where we can write plugins for helix in the near future.

[drsensor]

I've been using it for a month and it's terrific!

Previously I've been using kakoune and sometimes switch back to vscode only when doing JS stuff or just do either debugging or large refactoring. Now most of the time I'm using helix even for webdev and large refactoring. It even get more powerfull than vscode when I use pipe-shell feature with custom script leveraging fzf and tmux popup.

[mke]

Just tried it and was impressed. As an avid (n)vim user it was actually not that difficult to get used to the new keybindings. I’m missing an inbuilt terminal and vcs (git) integration. Also a tree browser for files would be nice, as I find fuzzy finding confusing at times. But they are at 90% of my neovim configuration already which is impressive.

[iainearl]

Helix looks awesome! I love the motion/command switch. As soon as it gets a plugin/extension system I'll give it a go! I have too much custom lua stuff written to switch without it!

[wyfyj]

I really liked this video. As a recent "Hello World" Rust programmer extraordinaire, I do like seeing an editor written in Rust. I saw some of the others but this seems to fit the bill of what I am wanting in an editor. I am not a high end developer or anything. Just trying to learn after over a decade of a break from programming/tech interest.

No matter what I do, I can't get Linux to work with my hardware perfectly. Gotta love building a very high end gaming PC and realizing I want to program more than I want to game.

So now after getting Windows back as a primary OS, I need to get this editor working. I was going down the rabbit hole of vim/nvim/emacs over any of the ones in the "Pop Shop". But not being on 5g wifi and the GPU driver making my 3070ti operate worse than the integrated graphics from my cpu, I couldn't do it.

Keep making content please. I like the structure or your videos. Very easy to follow.

[echoptic]

I heard about it but never gave it a try, i like the select first phylosophy, less confusing than vim, and displays exactly what it will do before hand

[peteranderson]

Love your videos. Thanks for introducing this to me 👍

[benfrainuk]

Great intro video! Thanks. Think i actually prefer the selection this way around and the multi selection seems far better than how you operate on multiple selections in Neovim/Vim. I just can’t get used to doing column selections etc.

Like you, don’t I’ll make the switch yet but if the gathers enough momentum it will be a serious contender 👍

[Adityarm.]

Just switched to helix from vim/vscode based workflows. Love it!

[kenneth_romero]

this looks pretty cool, will definitely give it a try. was planning on trying neovim but might as well try a "newer/better" version of it first to see what's different

[hogstudio]

All I need is the git integration PR that is not yet merged and I'm in. I was surprised to find that, among the infinite nvim plugins that exists, helix had decided to implement the ones that I use by default. I think it makes sense becuase of the advent of protocols (LSP, DAP), moving away from n:n implementations. Helix is awesome.

[ecogiko]

Awesome project! I really like what Helix is doing wrt shipping lsp + tree-sitter support out of the box. The mode switching remind of me spacemacs, it's very pleasant to use. The thing I can't do for now is fuzzy search for strings like I can for files, a la telescope fuzzy search

[jotarokujo]

I think Neovim is currently missing a lot of stuff out of the box and has a steep learning curve. This is especially prominent with the new LSP, where to have something sane you have to write a lot of configuration in non-declarative way. But for some reason devs are skeptical for the idea, that Neovim should be an IDE and, if I understand correctly (I might be wrong), therefore don't want to add simple things to the core - like file tree, keybindings helper etc.

Helix on the other hand is what Neovim in my opinion should try to be in a sense of the out of the box experience: zero configuration and it just works for programming.

[idhopkp]

I tried Helix for a while it's a very interesting editor and I think it might have a good future but unfortunately for now I'll stick with Neovim as I really miss the functionality like variable type highlighting etc that Neovim plugins can offer, I hope this project will develop and I will follow it)

[dev-is-life]

It will make me better with my work, thanks for your nice videos.

[ashutoshbiswas]

Thanks for introducing Helix. It's looks awesome.

[DAV]

I recommend this editor. All awkward feelings I felt when using vim are now gone.