19 ms·

Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

449 points by behnamoh 4y ago

nine_k 4y ago
From the description, the architecture is nicely modern. It's also interesting to see a project that seems young to already be version 22. What I tried to find and could not was some built-in language, more expressive than the one used to describe syntax highlighting. This means that extensibility is at best not a priority,
- pikelet 4y ago
  It's just date based versioning, so 22.08 is August, 2022.
- davidatbu 4y ago
  FWIW, the maintainers have been exploring various extensibility solutions. For e.g., I remember seeing a PR to allow a WASM-based plugin system, though I think it was abandoned because of the tradeoffs it posed.
  - makapuf 4y ago
    Interesting, do you have a link ?
    - timokoesters 4y ago
      https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/FAQ#how-to-write-plugins-is-there-a-plugin-system-in-place-yet https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/FAQ#how-to-write-...
asicsp 4y ago
Previous discussion: "Helix: a post-modern modal text editor" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 (657 points | 1 year ago | 365 comments)
embedded3 4y ago
Helix is great! The out-of-the-box LSP for C++ is a major strength, no config needed for me compared to 100% of all other editors I've used. The context-aware popups are nice too, and the overall UI is snappy and fresh. Highly recommend if you are a fan of modal editing and willing to try something new.
hit8run 4y ago
Tried it a year ago or so and liked it. Offers smart defaults.
cercatrova 4y ago
See also Lapce, an editor also written in Rust although it's trying to compete more with VSCode rather than Vim. Also, RIP OniVim 2, it was great having been written in a similarly fast ReasonML/OCaml but the creator ran out of funding and had to get a job. A shame, it even had compatibility with VSCode extensions.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Lapce is looking really promising IMO. It's very fast, has single-click support for a few languages (Rust of course) and the UI is surprisingly complete. Obviously there are still a ton of paper cuts but it's still very impressive and they are very welcoming of contributions. The only thing that concerns me slightly is that they're using their own fork of Druid which was pretty much labelled a failed experiment by its primary author (though tbf he still seems to be working on it). On the other hand the UI mostly looks and works really well! I've only noticed a couple of niggles - misalignments, labels not linked to check boxes, ugly context menus on Windows etc. (and that last one is mostly Windows's fault).
- skavi 4y ago
  Does anyone know what happened to Zas editor [0]? I was a huge fan of the concept (a mac-assed app [1] with first class Rust support). In fact, I was such a fan that I bought it, which has turned out to be a rather foolish move. The people behind it have gone completely silent. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952084 [1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-apps https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...
  - mgrandl 4y ago
    Yeah seems like a scam. I paid for it, requested an invoice and never got a reply. Never received a single software update either.
- sullyj3 4y ago
  Oni was presumably dead in the water as soon as they switched from Neovim to vim, as the initial backers would have been primarily composed of neovim enthusiasts
coffeeblack 4y ago
Looks very interesting. But what do the “plans for a GUI” mean for the terminal version?
- mbStavola 4y ago
  IIRC the plan is to migrate the core logic into a library that can be consumed by either a CLI or GUI. There were also some discussions of collaboration with the Neovide folks, something that I personally found very exciting as Neovide is an excellent Neovim client. However this was last year, not sure what the current status of all this is.
p-e-w 4y ago
I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they are fully integrated into Helix, but are an afterthought in (Neo)vim and Kakoune. The quality difference is obvious the moment you try it side by side. Nothing else really matters. Vim's and Kakoune's syntax highlighting is terrible, and while Neovim can now use Tree-Sitter as well, there always seem to be some additional hoops the user needs to jump through in order to get it to work. Not so with Helix. Regrettably, Helix has inherited Vim's worst design flaw, namely being unusable with non-English keyboard layouts, but all other Vim derivatives share this flaw as well so I don't see that stopping Helix from steamrolling the competition once it matures and the word spreads.
- elromulous 4y ago
  > I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. I hope this doesn't come off as flippant: I thought your comment was sarcastic at first. While I love seeing newer / better software displacing the old and crusty, this seems a little unlikely, no? It seems like somewhat of a miracle that neovim has taken as much share as it has. P.s. I'm hoping to eat my words one day.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    > It seems like somewhat of a miracle that neovim has taken as much share as it has. It's not a miracle but rather a testament to how much Neovim improves upon Vim. The number of useful features, among them Tree-Sitter and LSP, that Neovim has introduced has ended what feels like decades of stagnation in Vim development. Now imagine an editor like Neovim, but instead of working through 30 years of cruft and legacy code, it's built from the start using modern software engineering techniques and incorporates such features into its core editing model. That's essentially what Helix is. The Vim -> Neovim improvement is nothing compared to what Helix will deliver (and already is delivering in many aspects).
RapperWhoMadeIt 4y ago
I am currently almost entirely developing in Go. And for that I have a highly customized Vim environment, which really took me a while to get to where it is right now (it works very well, thanks to the great 'vim-go' plugin). Nonetheless, I am starting to have to develop more stuff in other languages like js and Elixir, and I definitely do not want to invest all that time tweaking my vimrc to have all the IDE bare functionality that works so well in Go. I was starting to consider making the transition into neovim, but Helix sounds almost like a plug-and-play solution with sane defaults (which is exactly what I would like to have). Is it better that I go for Helix, or is LunarVim or AstroVim actually what I am looking for?
- embedded3 4y ago
  Helix is a simple install, easy to give it a try and see what you think. For most people, there’s no configuration necessary to get started. I jumped through the hoops to get C++ tools in a variety of editors, and nothing was as simple as Helix for me.
aussiesnack 4y ago
I gave it a try out of curiosity with Rust, which you might reasonably expect to be well supported. But it didn't start a language server. So I followed the docs to find out how and was none the wiser. A tad undercooked, I'd say.
- Acur 4y ago
  The language server should work by just having rust-analyzer in you path. You can check with 'hx --health rust'. It also only works on Rust projects, not single files. You have to open helix with the path to the project folder for it to work.
  - aussiesnack 4y ago
    Yep thanks that does the trick.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- drekipus 4y ago
  This, people say it's no configuration but I had no idea how to make python work, and that's even after I got l figured out I had to --install-grammars our whatever the command was. Documentation is missing, it's a bit scattered
- exDM69 4y ago
  Make sure you have rust-analyzer installed, and check `hx --health` to see that Helix finds it. Not sure if this is still necessary, but I needed this workaround in ~/.config/helix/languages.toml: language-server = { command = "rustup", args = ["run", "nightly", "rust-analyzer"]} This should not be necessary when rust-analyzer is stabilized (may be already), but last time I tried it still needed nightly.
  - aussiesnack 4y ago
    Thanks. Hadn't realised I needed to have the lsp server binary on the path. I think nvim-lspconfig takes care of that for me in nvim. From a brief experiment basic lsp usage seems to work in helix without any config changes, so perhaps that's changed since you set it up.
xigoi 4y ago
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be programmable yet, although the FAQ says there are plans for implementing a plugin system.
- ufo 4y ago
  The FAQ currently mentions that they're planning on implementing a LISP dialect. I wonder why they chose that instead of an existing language (e.g. Lua, Tcl, or Guile)
doix 4y ago
Super cool to see another competitor in this space. There's no support for tabs, I really hope it's coming and they implement them in the same way vim does. So far the buffer/window implementation matches vim (as far as I can tell), so I really hope the tab implementation matches as well. If they could implement the client/server architecture of kakoune, then this would really best editor (for me). It's a shame each editor implements a different subset of all the features I like and I'm always choosing between them. Edit: Looks like there's an issue for tabs: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2295 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2295 , doesn't have too much traction. I hope someone picks it up, unfortunately my rust sucks far too much to get it done in any reasonable amount of time.
- gnull 4y ago
  Tabs should be implemented by an external tool, like Tmux or whatever. This is how Kakoune does it.
  - doix 4y ago
    Kakoune has a client/server mode so that the client instances can talk to the same server. This way unsaved changes to a buffer are visible across instances + all the registers etc are shared. Helix doesn't have that functionality. Kakoune also doesn't have splits at all where as Helix does, so the design philosophy is different between the editors. Personally, I would prefer if tabs were first class citizens in the editor, but would make do with scuffed tabs if there was a server/client model implemented.
jalino23 4y ago
just started using this today and fell in love and hoping to replace my current main editor which is vscode with vim bindings. I don’t wanna spend hours on configs so I really like its opinionated defaults
- Casperin 4y ago
  I did this in February after 20 years in Vim. Haven't opened vim since. Happy coding my friend :)
Q-and-A 4y ago
Does anyone happen to know if there is a terminal IDE that more or less operates like the very basics of popular GUI IDEs? By this I mean has a file manager pane which can be manipulated by mouse, allows multiple open tabs which are selectable and closable by mouse, is generally mouse-aware with regard to cursor activity on the text, and operates as a regular user would expect (not modal)? The closest thing I've found to this is Micro, but the full IDE experience is missing. I know mouse-aware file manager and tab capabilities are possible in terminal IDEs, but I haven't seen anything that simply put it all together as a cohesive and easy-to-use whole that anyone who has used VSCode could quickly start using for basic editing of multiple files in a project.
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  You may want to try Warp: https://www.warp.dev/ https://www.warp.dev/
  - __warlord__ 4y ago
    You require to log in to use this. For me is a no no. Next thing you know... you have warp stories in your terminal.
- bartq 4y ago
  Try https://github.com/AstroNvim/AstroNvim https://github.com/AstroNvim/AstroNvim, mouse works nicely out of the box, there is also a files tree.
- drekipus 4y ago
  Emacs
- anthomtb 4y ago
  Can I ask why you would want such a mouse-aware terminal-based IDE? Because it sounds like an oxymoron.
  - davidatbu 4y ago
    Not OP, but I get their frustration. File browsing is not very amenable to keyboard based navigation IMO. I'm currently using fdfind through telescope.nvim as well as another neovim plugin for this, but I can easily see why someone would want to use a terminal based text editor, with a mouse based file navigation tool.
buf 4y ago
Does it work with tmux? I need to run my code in one pane and send commands to a console in another pane. I use this feature at least 100 times a day. edit: it does work with tmux
maxhille 4y ago
Quickly tried it out and feels quite good. Unfortunately I also have to use IntelliJ, where I use the Vim-Mode (IDEAVim plugin) and I would have a hard time toggling my muscle-memory multiple times a day...
- bestouff 4y ago
  Yes Helix has its own keybidings which may be nicer but need learning. I would have made it my daily driver if it had classic (n)vim bidings.
- marliechiller 4y ago
  does anyone know of any plugin which does the same as the IDEAVim plugin? I'd like to try this kakoune based layout in intellij for the same reasons but this is a bit of a blocker if I have to keep flipping between vim and kakoune bindings.
cloverr20 4y ago
I have not tried the editor itself, but one thing that puts me off is how some people are claiming its going to replace vim/nevoim and others by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter support. I am working as a full time developer for the last 4-5 years and I never needed to use auto complete (for long words C-x n is there) and the current syntax highlighting seems fine. Vim is working great for me and I don't feel any reason to switch to others. Instead of bashing other editors, maybe just tell what makes your editor unique and why people would want to use it?
- awestroke 4y ago
  - tnfru 4y ago
    He very explicitly stated what about the post was off-putting to him. You made a comment about being personally attacked while repeating the tool is better without any argument whatsoever. You're exactly proving the point of the comment.
    - awestroke 4y ago
      No, they stated that they personally have no interest in using better tools (lsp, autocomplete etc).
      - 411111111111111 4y ago
        No, they contextualized that these improvements aren't actually improving anything for them, as they're not actually interested in using these features. And thus, it's no longer a better tool for them.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - tnfru 4y ago
newaccount2021 4y ago
cod1r 4y ago
I've tried helix and it doesn't seem as customizable as neovim/vim. I also prefer neovim/vim's default keybindings much more. While I can't see helix replacing neovim/vim, I can see people using it, as it has defaults that could appeal to some people. It's also fast.
buf 4y ago
If people want to replace vim, they should not change the keybindings.
- exDM69 4y ago
  They not only change the keybindings, they change the editor paradigm from a verb-noun model (dw = delete word) to a noun-verb (wd = select word, then delete) model. Multiple cursors also have an effect. It's pretty close to vim keybindings, but the paradigm change makes it incompatible with 1:1 keybindings. That said, coming from 15+ years of Vim, I was felt pretty much immediately at home with Kakoune, and dropped right in to Helix with comfort.
  - dm319 4y ago
    What do you think about beginning of line and end of line movements? Is it really home/end? Seems like a common movement to assign to far-away keys?
    - kybernetikos 4y ago
      gh beginning of line gl end of line Both key presses are home row, and as soon as you press the 'g', you get a little pop up telling you about them.
p2hari 4y ago
Really like the sane defaults with Helix, just waiting like many users for the copilot integration. (https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1927 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1927)
benvds 4y ago
Played around with a bit. In my experience compared to a configured vim: - once you have your local language servers available it works quite nicely out of the box. syntax highlighting, file finder, lsp navigation, formatting, etc. just works - its fast - i really like having the order of selection->action instead of action->movement - im still missing some features like a navigation tree and a quickfix list or something to do project wide find/replace.
gnull 4y ago
I'm a Kakoune user. What will change in my life if I move to Helix?
plaguepilled 4y ago
Glad they had the nerve to diverge from the standard vim keybinds. (For those who like the traditional vim binds, I salute you, but I have craved an upgrade for a while now)
- ziftface 4y ago
  I wouldn't even say 'like', it's just that I don't see a big enough advantage to switch. I built up enough muscle memory over the years and while helix might be slightly better (I don't actually know how much better, but I tried it and the impression I got was that it was at most only slightly better), that slight improvement doesn't really make up for the cost, which is being really slow for a while until you get used to it. Also you're giving up all your plugins. Also, you're giving up universal support in pretty much every other editor, since there are vim bindings in emacs, vscode, visual studio, jet brains ides, xcode, etc. Vim isn't going anywhere, so it just makes more sense for me to continue using it. Maybe for new people they could get into helix? I love that there's more options for people and I hope they can cross-pollinate ideas. But it's a hard sell to be honest.
  - plaguepilled 4y ago
    Seems like we agree! I don't think there's much need for people happy with the existing Vim layout to switch, and Vim is still a very serviceable editor. My comment more spoke to my personal tastes around editors. :)
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  I don't particularly like vim keybindings - actually the very fact that they become so much of a consuming hobby for many people speaks to me of real problems with them. But their availability in so many tools aside from vim/nvim makes them very practical, given things as they are. It's a bit like QWERTY. Ubiquitious presence can be more practically useful than intrinsic advantages.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  Their absolutely should be more iteration/experimentation on modal editing, its still the right paradigm for coding to me
djaouen 4y ago
Without macros, I won't be switching anytime soon.
- AndrewVos 4y ago
  You can record macros in helix.
- gnuvince 4y ago
  It has macros.
exDM69 4y ago
I've used Helix for all my recreational programming projects (in Rust) for about 6 months and I've written about 10kLOC of code with it. Still using vim at $WORK for a variety of reasons (giant c++ codebase that does not easily plug in to clangd/LSP), but I might be doing the switch soon. Installation was easy and the default configuration is good. Plugging in rust-analyzer still needed a line or two of config file editing, but that should not be necessary for very long. Hint: use `hx --health` to check that all the tools are properly installed and configured (it shows a matrix of programming languages and their associated tooling, with red/green check marks). My Helix config file is about 5 lines long, but my Vim config is in the hundreds of lines. I had very little friction coming from Vim and a little bit of Kakoune. I particularly like the fact that all the important features are built-in and not half baked scripts with unintended side effects (e.g. opening a Makefile in Vim triggers a ftplugin script that messes editor-global config instead of buffer-local, with the default out of the box scripts). Lots of people are requesting a plugin extension system, which is kinda understandable since every editor seems to have one. But I haven't had a need to add any kind of plugin, and it's easy enough to fork a shell for an external process if needed. It's still rough around the edges, but good enough for a daily driver. Thanks to everyone working on the project.
- eating555 4y ago
  I think the fact that helix doesn't really need a plugin/extension system is beautiful. It means that it's simple enough to config yet still powerful. Helix smooth out the learning curve in this good way and I hope it won't become complicated and make learning curve as deep as vim/nvim.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  >I've used Helix for all my recreational programming projects (in Rust) for about 6 months and I've written about 10kLOC of code with it. Still using vim at $WORK for a variety of reasons (giant c++ codebase that does not easily plug in to clangd/LSP), but I might be doing the switch soon. Do you have some supernatural ability to quickly (re)learn muscle memory for new keybindings? I’d consider myself a fairly advanced vim user, and it took me literally a couple years to get to the point of fluently using complex navigation/editing commands. I took a look at the Helix documentation, and while it’s definitely “vim inspired,” it’s different enough [0] that I would have to rewire years of muscle memory to be as productive as I am in vim. There are some very fundamental differences, e.g. the verb/object syntax is reversed in Helix; `dw` in vim is `wd` in Helix. When I want to rewrite a string in vim, I unconsciously type `ci"`; it would take me a long time with Helix to regain that level of fluency. [0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Migrating-from-Vim https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Migrating-from-Vi...
rami3l 4y ago
I love to see that Helix tries its best to ensure an out-of-the-box experience, as well as to add so many interactive hints for key combinations (for example when you want to paste in insert mode with C-R it’ll immediately list a set of registers that you can paste from). However Vim is much more to me. It’s not just an editor, but a keybinding that I can use not only in nain, but also in VSCode, in fish shell, and even in GHCi REPL. How long would it take to make them all support (some reasonable subset of) Helix?
- rami3l 4y ago
  * nain -> nvim
wvh 4y ago
I have been trying out Helix for the last few months as part of my now 24 year quest to incorporate some form of vi into my daily routine. This time, it's looking good. What sets it apart are the (zero-conf) built-in LSP and tree-sitter highlighting, and the select-verb modal keybindings instead of vi's verb-object syntax, where you see what you're about to do before you do it. Some of the key combinations also show a reminder menu, aiding the learning process, which is a nice touch over plain old vi which has zero discoverability. General performance is also very good, the editor feels a lot snappier than a fully loaded Neovim or Doom Emacs, or a monster like Visual Code. I think there are plans to see if a graphical editor could be built on top of it, which would be an interesting project. As a new Rust graphical tree-sitter based editor, it would probably rival the upcoming open-or-not Zed editor by the Atom folks.
- mattrighetti 4y ago
  Zed is more aimed towards collaborative development at the moment, at least this is how it’s marketed on their website.
- fordsmith 4y ago
  Man, I don't know what has happened but the spur for new editors has.been delightful. I have been using Zed for a bit since I made it into the closed beta, but it has been very nice to use. VSCode does the job pretty well, but it just feels more clunky to me, and I have hitches quite often. It is not bad, but I want something more performant while giving me the style of vim and emacs. Zed definitely has some rough edges and some sorely missing features (that are being worked on), but it just feels better to use. I know so many people probably discount these projects because of the RIIR meme, but it really has spurred more inovations that we should all be grateful for.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    For the uninitiated: RIIR = Rewrite it in Rust
  - dilap 4y ago
    RIIR doesn't scare me at all -- as a user, my experience has been the rust rewrites are usually high-quality improvements over the original. Ripgrep is legendary! It is a huge accomplishment of Rust to enable the creation of better versions of lang-standing highly-optimized-C tools. (Which inspired me to kick the tires a bit on the language; it felt like C++ done right to me. Being able to write threaded code w/o fear of data-races is very cool.)
totetsu 4y ago
how is this pronounced? H E double hocky stix?
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I assumed it was just the English word "helix", which in AmE is pronounced like "he licks".
- bschwindHN 4y ago
  Helix? Hellix?
lampe3 4y ago
On of the things with vim/neovim for me what was a deal breaker is that you could not turn off/on LSP's for different projects. So neovim got slow for me. I also don't wanted to copy my config for each project. Does Helix have a solution for this?
- nerdponx 4y ago
  For what it's worth, you can definitely disable autostart conditionally in nvim-lspconfig, maybe using on_new_config and setting autostart=false therein.
sylware 4y ago
does it compile with the rust-written rust compiler? Do we have elf64 static binaries of this compiler? (with minimal usage of syscalls).
psuresh 4y ago
Does this 'written in Rust, written in Zig, written in Go' make any difference in the user experience? See this often nowadays.
- gnulynnux 4y ago
  Yes. In my experience, Rust projects are always easy to install. Cargo is much nicer than, say, npm or conda.
- the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
  If "contributing to the project" is part of the user experience then yes.
- slazaro 4y ago
  I assume, besides looking for contributors, that not being based on Atom or similar is a selling point.
- phao 4y ago
  Directly, I believe this has more to do with people interested in the language seeing it being used in actual projects. Indirectly (a lot indirectly), sure. Maybe the software should perform better or maybe have fewer bugs because programming language X or Y is understood to help with those things. Maybe it showcases a more flexible architectural design, which leads to more potential features in future versions, etc.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    It also hints at the mindset and values of the creator. Communities around languages value things that may or may not line up with the qualities of the language they form around, but simply the fact they value those things is reflected by rhe things they produce. If people think a language is performant, then performance will be something their community values. If it is known for having a learning curve, their product might too.
  - acje 4y ago
    A bit like seeing «car built in carbon fiber”. May poke the interest in materials or imply different quality attributes and design intent.
willeum 4y ago
Tried it a few months ago Felt more responsive than neovim/neovide, and out-of-box was great. However, while the selection > verb scheme conceptually made sense, I noticed it took longer to do many basic text editing functions than it would with vim bindings. Perhaps others had a different experience?
- Casperin 4y ago
  I've used Helix since February, and vim for 20 years prior. For basic edits it's roughly on par now for me (maybe a bit slower?); but then Helix has really neat tree-sitter integration, so as I'm getting more and more used to that, I find myself jumping around code faster and with more precision. I also never have these moments of fat-fingering a key and then have vim go nuts on me. Like I suddenly deleted half the function and ended up in some mode I've never heard of while doing a recursive recording. ... just mentioning that because I believe (but not sure) that it's because of this selection > verb scheme that I don't ever see that happening in Helix :)
_joel 4y ago
Looks great, I've aliased vim to hx as muscle memory. Will give it a test, I'm guilty of having lots of stuff installed on vim I don't really know how to use (or even vim's full power)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ziml77 4y ago
I went into this expecting it to be another toy editor that someone was showing off. But no, this thing is legitimately impressive! I had just been messing around with my neovim config because of that Leap plugin that was posted here. I decided to also install and configure the Lua language server because I wanted to try switching away from Vimscript for my init file. Since that file was still fresh in my mind, it was the first thing I opened after installing Helix, and to my surprise it immediately showed me warning markers in the gutter and moving the cursor over the underlined symbol showed the langue server's complaints. I love that it just worked from having the language server installed! Also while messing with neovim yesterday I was thinking about seeing if there was a plugin to show possible operations after pressing the leader key, like what you get with Spacemacs. I decided to try hitting the spacebar in Helix to see what happened and was impressed to see that it popped up with a menu showing how I could continue my input. I'm sure I'll run into annoyances after using it for a while, but damn does this project leave an excellent first impression.
betwixthewires 4y ago
I already use this as my daily driver for everything, especially writing code. Have been using it for a few months. It gets better with every release. I love it. It's got a few quirks. Trying to navigate while in insert mode (I know bad habits die hard) will have you undoing a lot of unintended autocompletes unless you turn LSP off. Tab to complete is a must for autocomplete features, and it should never autocomplete in comments or a completed line of code. So a little rough around the edges, but still wonderful to use.
dm319 4y ago
One of the reasons I love n/vi/m is the ergonomic benefit of using keys that are close to your touch typing position. I'm a bit disappointed that beginning and end of line in helix are home and end.
- vulcan01 4y ago
  You can also use `gh` and `gl` for start and end of line (and `gs` for first non-whitespace character in line). These options (among others) pop up when using helix and typing `g`.
  - dm319 4y ago
    Ok, so in vim I'd type 'd$' as "delete to end of line". What is the equivalent in helix? EDIT: while I'm here, where are the sentence and paragraph movements?
    - Acur 4y ago
      The fastest way to do this in Helix would be `t<Enter>d`. edit: Paragraph and other object movement/selection is done by the `[`, `]` menu. `]p` for the next paragraph. Surrounds are done by the `m` menu.
      - dm319 4y ago
        Thanks, that's helpful. I get it - so 't' is 'to' and enter is new line. Makes sense. The menu under `[` looks good, but very code-focused and lacking sentences. EDIT: I am finding it a bit weird to have 'go to's as different to movements. There isn't a distinction in vim, which is useful. I'm learning that 'ge' will take me to the end of file, but I can't do 'ged' to delete to there.
        bobbyskelton41 4y ago
        You can do vged. Currently ge takes you to the last line, but there is a change planned to take you to the absolute end.
scblock 4y ago
I gave Helix a try last week and I think there are a lot of things to like about it, but until it supports soft text wrapping for prose documents it's effectively useless to me. I'm not going to bounce back and forth between neovim and helix depending on whether I'm editing code, documentation, or personal notes. The comments on the open issue in Github are not particularly encouraging. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/136 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/136
- bobbyskelton41 4y ago
  I would say they're pretty encouraging. There's a straightforward path to implement it, and some work is being done on that front.
  - aussiesnack 4y ago
    As far as I understand from scanning the PR, there's been more than a year of discussion with no actual progress on a basic (if not in this case simple to implement) feature which is universally available in text editors. Helix looks nice in many ways (I installed it last night and have worked with it on a couple of Rust projects today) but it's clearly more of a research project with potential than current practical tool.
    - bobbyskelton41 4y ago
      I wouldn't say so. It's taken so long because it hasn't been a priority for the developers, and nobody else picked it up.
JaggerFoo 4y ago
I've used vi from Linux terminal sessions for more than a decade, and VS Code as a GUI editor now most times when not in a terminal session. Am I missing something not using a GUI vi editor? I came across some dude on YouTube that calls himself "The Primeagen" that swears by VIM, but I couldn't follow his use of it.
seagoj 4y ago
If it had vim key bindings, I might try it, but without them, I don't see how it's worth the effort to switch.
superkuh 4y ago
I don't understand why "in Rust" makes these irrelevant posts somethign worth of the HN frontpage. All it means is that you won't be able to compile it yourself unless you use a fast rolling distro or out of repository tools to get this month's compatible rustc with rustup or curl|sh, etc.
- bobbyskelton41 4y ago
  It sticks with the MSRV of Firefox, which is currently 1.61.
tiffanyh 4y ago
Some interesting stats: - Helix has 624 open issues (1,103 closed) [0] - Vim has 1,172 open issues (5,518 closed)[1] - NeoVim has 1,258 open issues (7,496 closed)[2] - VSCode has 7,463 open issues (136,638 closed) [3] [0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues [1] https://github.com/vim/vim/issues https://github.com/vim/vim/issues [2] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues [3] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues
- darkwinx 4y ago
  could you explain what you find interesting from this stats?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
canMarsHaveLife 4y ago
How does it compare to LunarVim (https://www.lunarvim.org https://www.lunarvim.org)?
- ar_lan 4y ago
  LunarVim is entirely NeoVim with default plugins baked in and maintained. I would translate this back to just debating Helix vs NeoVim.
  - canMarsHaveLife 4y ago
    It makes sense.
Protostome 4y ago
I'm a big fan of open source software and have tons of respect for any OSS developer, regardless of the software he/she develops. But I have to say, as a developer who has been taking part in the OSS scence for the last 20 years, it is very strange to me that some developers feel obliged to indicate they wrote a piece of code with Rust. If I'm a user, I care much more that this is a usable software than what kind of programming language was used. For all I care, write it in binary. Rust may be a great programming language, but it is only a mean to an end.
- chatterhead 4y ago
  Pretty sure the Rust nod is for the HN audience; not just a nebulous end user.
- cactus2093 4y ago
  I can think of several ways this is useful to know: 1. As OSS software, some users will want to edit the code and add features, and knowing what language it’s written in is a pre-requisite to doing that. 2. The developer community is an important factor in making OSS projects successful. If I’m going to take a chance on a young project, I want to know that it is set up to have a strong community and continue to be improved over time. If it was hand-written in binary or assembly as you suggest, there is no chance it would grow a popular community of developer contributions. 3. Like it or not, different programming language communities have developed around different values in how to build software. The Rust community generally promotes strong type safety that makes entire classes of bugs much less likely which is a plus to me as a user. 4. With editors in particular, the language it’s written in often leaks into the user experience. E.g. Emacs is written and configured in Lisp, Vim has a ton of legacy cruft in the C and vimscript codebase that can make it annoying to compile/install, annoying to build plugins for, and has made modern features like asynchronous tasks difficult to add, which was the whole reason for neovim existing. VSCode has plugins written in JavaScript. Knowing this project is written in Rust gives me some hints that it probably won’t share any of these similarities with these other editors.
phao 4y ago
By the way... which font is being used in the readme screenshot? https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/screenshot.png https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/screenshot...
- quic5 4y ago
  Looks a lot like JetBrains Mono but I’m not 100% sure
contingencies 4y ago
Low contrast default color scheme = non-starter
- Casperin 4y ago
  I got you. Put this in your ~/.config/helix/config.toml. theme = "bogster" Or type `:theme` and use tab to cycle through the themes (it'll apply the theme to the current file while you cycle, no need to hit enter).
  - contingencies 4y ago
    Thanks. One theme (autumn_night) has a black background. Next up: keys suck. I often use dw or d/something and these fail. Any quick way to resolve?
    - Casperin 4y ago
      No. And I hope there never will be. It's a different editor with its own ideas about how modal editing should be done. It does not sound like that has your interest. That's fine. Stick with vim.
archseer 4y ago
Helix author here: I think the poster chose an unfortunate headline. 1) Helix was written to replace my neovim setup but is in fact kakoune inspired. 2) It's written in Rust but I don't draw focus to it precisely because RiiR/"X in Rust" posts are getting a bit tiring to see.
- Casperin 4y ago
  Helix is awesome. Thank you for doing this!
conaclos 4y ago
One missing feature for me is a tree view of the project folder [1]. A contributor is working on that [2]. [1] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/200 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/200 [2] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/2377 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/2377
SuperSandro2000 4y ago
Yet another editor :shrug:
barrenko 4y ago
Can someone help me with how to make a caret in insert mode to line instead of block? Most themes are just block cursor both in "read" and insert mode, hurts visibility.

449 points by behnamoh 4y ago

From the description, the architecture is nicely modern. It's also interesting to see a project that seems young to already be version 22. What I tried to find and could not was some built-in language, more expressive than the one used to describe syntax highlighting. This means that extensibility is at best not a priority,

pikelet 4y ago
It's just date based versioning, so 22.08 is August, 2022.
davidatbu 4y ago
FWIW, the maintainers have been exploring various extensibility solutions. For e.g., I remember seeing a PR to allow a WASM-based plugin system, though I think it was abandoned because of the tradeoffs it posed.
- makapuf 4y ago
  Interesting, do you have a link ?
  - timokoesters 4y ago
    https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/FAQ#how-to-write-plugins-is-there-a-plugin-system-in-place-yet https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/FAQ#how-to-write-...

asicsp 4y ago

Previous discussion: "Helix: a post-modern modal text editor" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479 (657 points | 1 year ago | 365 comments)

embedded3 4y ago

Helix is great! The out-of-the-box LSP for C++ is a major strength, no config needed for me compared to 100% of all other editors I've used. The context-aware popups are nice too, and the overall UI is snappy and fresh. Highly recommend if you are a fan of modal editing and willing to try something new.

hit8run 4y ago

Tried it a year ago or so and liked it. Offers smart defaults.

cercatrova 4y ago

See also Lapce, an editor also written in Rust although it's trying to compete more with VSCode rather than Vim. Also, RIP OniVim 2, it was great having been written in a similarly fast ReasonML/OCaml but the creator ran out of funding and had to get a job. A shame, it even had compatibility with VSCode extensions.

IshKebab 4y ago
Lapce is looking really promising IMO. It's very fast, has single-click support for a few languages (Rust of course) and the UI is surprisingly complete. Obviously there are still a ton of paper cuts but it's still very impressive and they are very welcoming of contributions. The only thing that concerns me slightly is that they're using their own fork of Druid which was pretty much labelled a failed experiment by its primary author (though tbf he still seems to be working on it). On the other hand the UI mostly looks and works really well! I've only noticed a couple of niggles - misalignments, labels not linked to check boxes, ugly context menus on Windows etc. (and that last one is mostly Windows's fault).
skavi 4y ago
Does anyone know what happened to Zas editor [0]? I was a huge fan of the concept (a mac-assed app [1] with first class Rust support). In fact, I was such a fan that I bought it, which has turned out to be a rather foolish move. The people behind it have gone completely silent. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952084 [1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-apps https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...
- mgrandl 4y ago
  Yeah seems like a scam. I paid for it, requested an invoice and never got a reply. Never received a single software update either.
sullyj3 4y ago
Oni was presumably dead in the water as soon as they switched from Neovim to vim, as the initial backers would have been primarily composed of neovim enthusiasts

coffeeblack 4y ago

Looks very interesting. But what do the “plans for a GUI” mean for the terminal version?

mbStavola 4y ago
IIRC the plan is to migrate the core logic into a library that can be consumed by either a CLI or GUI. There were also some discussions of collaboration with the Neovide folks, something that I personally found very exciting as Neovide is an excellent Neovim client. However this was last year, not sure what the current status of all this is.

p-e-w 4y ago

I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server. Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they are fully integrated into Helix, but are an afterthought in (Neo)vim and Kakoune. The quality difference is obvious the moment you try it side by side. Nothing else really matters. Vim's and Kakoune's syntax highlighting is terrible, and while Neovim can now use Tree-Sitter as well, there always seem to be some additional hoops the user needs to jump through in order to get it to work. Not so with Helix. Regrettably, Helix has inherited Vim's worst design flaw, namely being unusable with non-English keyboard layouts, but all other Vim derivatives share this flaw as well so I don't see that stopping Helix from steamrolling the competition once it matures and the word spreads.

elromulous 4y ago
> I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run. I hope this doesn't come off as flippant: I thought your comment was sarcastic at first. While I love seeing newer / better software displacing the old and crusty, this seems a little unlikely, no? It seems like somewhat of a miracle that neovim has taken as much share as it has. P.s. I'm hoping to eat my words one day.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  > It seems like somewhat of a miracle that neovim has taken as much share as it has. It's not a miracle but rather a testament to how much Neovim improves upon Vim. The number of useful features, among them Tree-Sitter and LSP, that Neovim has introduced has ended what feels like decades of stagnation in Vim development. Now imagine an editor like Neovim, but instead of working through 30 years of cruft and legacy code, it's built from the start using modern software engineering techniques and incorporates such features into its core editing model. That's essentially what Helix is. The Vim -> Neovim improvement is nothing compared to what Helix will deliver (and already is delivering in many aspects).

RapperWhoMadeIt 4y ago

I am currently almost entirely developing in Go. And for that I have a highly customized Vim environment, which really took me a while to get to where it is right now (it works very well, thanks to the great 'vim-go' plugin). Nonetheless, I am starting to have to develop more stuff in other languages like js and Elixir, and I definitely do not want to invest all that time tweaking my vimrc to have all the IDE bare functionality that works so well in Go. I was starting to consider making the transition into neovim, but Helix sounds almost like a plug-and-play solution with sane defaults (which is exactly what I would like to have). Is it better that I go for Helix, or is LunarVim or AstroVim actually what I am looking for?

embedded3 4y ago
Helix is a simple install, easy to give it a try and see what you think. For most people, there’s no configuration necessary to get started. I jumped through the hoops to get C++ tools in a variety of editors, and nothing was as simple as Helix for me.

aussiesnack 4y ago

I gave it a try out of curiosity with Rust, which you might reasonably expect to be well supported. But it didn't start a language server. So I followed the docs to find out how and was none the wiser. A tad undercooked, I'd say.

Acur 4y ago
The language server should work by just having rust-analyzer in you path. You can check with 'hx --health rust'. It also only works on Rust projects, not single files. You have to open helix with the path to the project folder for it to work.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  Yep thanks that does the trick.
newaccount2021 4y ago
drekipus 4y ago
This, people say it's no configuration but I had no idea how to make python work, and that's even after I got l figured out I had to --install-grammars our whatever the command was. Documentation is missing, it's a bit scattered
exDM69 4y ago
Make sure you have rust-analyzer installed, and check `hx --health` to see that Helix finds it. Not sure if this is still necessary, but I needed this workaround in ~/.config/helix/languages.toml: language-server = { command = "rustup", args = ["run", "nightly", "rust-analyzer"]} This should not be necessary when rust-analyzer is stabilized (may be already), but last time I tried it still needed nightly.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  Thanks. Hadn't realised I needed to have the lsp server binary on the path. I think nvim-lspconfig takes care of that for me in nvim. From a brief experiment basic lsp usage seems to work in helix without any config changes, so perhaps that's changed since you set it up.

xigoi 4y ago

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be programmable yet, although the FAQ says there are plans for implementing a plugin system.

ufo 4y ago
The FAQ currently mentions that they're planning on implementing a LISP dialect. I wonder why they chose that instead of an existing language (e.g. Lua, Tcl, or Guile)

doix 4y ago

Super cool to see another competitor in this space. There's no support for tabs, I really hope it's coming and they implement them in the same way vim does. So far the buffer/window implementation matches vim (as far as I can tell), so I really hope the tab implementation matches as well. If they could implement the client/server architecture of kakoune, then this would really best editor (for me). It's a shame each editor implements a different subset of all the features I like and I'm always choosing between them. Edit: Looks like there's an issue for tabs: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2295 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2295 , doesn't have too much traction. I hope someone picks it up, unfortunately my rust sucks far too much to get it done in any reasonable amount of time.

gnull 4y ago
Tabs should be implemented by an external tool, like Tmux or whatever. This is how Kakoune does it.
- doix 4y ago
  Kakoune has a client/server mode so that the client instances can talk to the same server. This way unsaved changes to a buffer are visible across instances + all the registers etc are shared. Helix doesn't have that functionality. Kakoune also doesn't have splits at all where as Helix does, so the design philosophy is different between the editors. Personally, I would prefer if tabs were first class citizens in the editor, but would make do with scuffed tabs if there was a server/client model implemented.

jalino23 4y ago

just started using this today and fell in love and hoping to replace my current main editor which is vscode with vim bindings. I don’t wanna spend hours on configs so I really like its opinionated defaults

Casperin 4y ago
I did this in February after 20 years in Vim. Haven't opened vim since. Happy coding my friend :)

Q-and-A 4y ago

Does anyone happen to know if there is a terminal IDE that more or less operates like the very basics of popular GUI IDEs? By this I mean has a file manager pane which can be manipulated by mouse, allows multiple open tabs which are selectable and closable by mouse, is generally mouse-aware with regard to cursor activity on the text, and operates as a regular user would expect (not modal)? The closest thing I've found to this is Micro, but the full IDE experience is missing. I know mouse-aware file manager and tab capabilities are possible in terminal IDEs, but I haven't seen anything that simply put it all together as a cohesive and easy-to-use whole that anyone who has used VSCode could quickly start using for basic editing of multiple files in a project.

sanxiyn 4y ago
You may want to try Warp: https://www.warp.dev/ https://www.warp.dev/
- __warlord__ 4y ago
  You require to log in to use this. For me is a no no. Next thing you know... you have warp stories in your terminal.
bartq 4y ago
Try https://github.com/AstroNvim/AstroNvim https://github.com/AstroNvim/AstroNvim, mouse works nicely out of the box, there is also a files tree.
drekipus 4y ago
Emacs
anthomtb 4y ago
Can I ask why you would want such a mouse-aware terminal-based IDE? Because it sounds like an oxymoron.
- davidatbu 4y ago
  Not OP, but I get their frustration. File browsing is not very amenable to keyboard based navigation IMO. I'm currently using fdfind through telescope.nvim as well as another neovim plugin for this, but I can easily see why someone would want to use a terminal based text editor, with a mouse based file navigation tool.

buf 4y ago

Does it work with tmux? I need to run my code in one pane and send commands to a console in another pane. I use this feature at least 100 times a day. edit: it does work with tmux

maxhille 4y ago

Quickly tried it out and feels quite good. Unfortunately I also have to use IntelliJ, where I use the Vim-Mode (IDEAVim plugin) and I would have a hard time toggling my muscle-memory multiple times a day...

bestouff 4y ago
Yes Helix has its own keybidings which may be nicer but need learning. I would have made it my daily driver if it had classic (n)vim bidings.
marliechiller 4y ago
does anyone know of any plugin which does the same as the IDEAVim plugin? I'd like to try this kakoune based layout in intellij for the same reasons but this is a bit of a blocker if I have to keep flipping between vim and kakoune bindings.

cloverr20 4y ago

I have not tried the editor itself, but one thing that puts me off is how some people are claiming its going to replace vim/nevoim and others by the virtue of its great LSP and tree sitter support. I am working as a full time developer for the last 4-5 years and I never needed to use auto complete (for long words C-x n is there) and the current syntax highlighting seems fine. Vim is working great for me and I don't feel any reason to switch to others. Instead of bashing other editors, maybe just tell what makes your editor unique and why people would want to use it?

awestroke 4y ago
- tnfru 4y ago
  He very explicitly stated what about the post was off-putting to him. You made a comment about being personally attacked while repeating the tool is better without any argument whatsoever. You're exactly proving the point of the comment.
  - awestroke 4y ago
    No, they stated that they personally have no interest in using better tools (lsp, autocomplete etc).
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      No, they contextualized that these improvements aren't actually improving anything for them, as they're not actually interested in using these features. And thus, it's no longer a better tool for them.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - tnfru 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago

cod1r 4y ago

I've tried helix and it doesn't seem as customizable as neovim/vim. I also prefer neovim/vim's default keybindings much more. While I can't see helix replacing neovim/vim, I can see people using it, as it has defaults that could appeal to some people. It's also fast.

buf 4y ago

If people want to replace vim, they should not change the keybindings.

exDM69 4y ago
They not only change the keybindings, they change the editor paradigm from a verb-noun model (dw = delete word) to a noun-verb (wd = select word, then delete) model. Multiple cursors also have an effect. It's pretty close to vim keybindings, but the paradigm change makes it incompatible with 1:1 keybindings. That said, coming from 15+ years of Vim, I was felt pretty much immediately at home with Kakoune, and dropped right in to Helix with comfort.
- dm319 4y ago
  What do you think about beginning of line and end of line movements? Is it really home/end? Seems like a common movement to assign to far-away keys?
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    gh beginning of line gl end of line Both key presses are home row, and as soon as you press the 'g', you get a little pop up telling you about them.

p2hari 4y ago

Really like the sane defaults with Helix, just waiting like many users for the copilot integration. (https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1927 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1927)

benvds 4y ago

Played around with a bit. In my experience compared to a configured vim: - once you have your local language servers available it works quite nicely out of the box. syntax highlighting, file finder, lsp navigation, formatting, etc. just works - its fast - i really like having the order of selection->action instead of action->movement - im still missing some features like a navigation tree and a quickfix list or something to do project wide find/replace.

gnull 4y ago

I'm a Kakoune user. What will change in my life if I move to Helix?

plaguepilled 4y ago

Glad they had the nerve to diverge from the standard vim keybinds. (For those who like the traditional vim binds, I salute you, but I have craved an upgrade for a while now)

ziftface 4y ago
I wouldn't even say 'like', it's just that I don't see a big enough advantage to switch. I built up enough muscle memory over the years and while helix might be slightly better (I don't actually know how much better, but I tried it and the impression I got was that it was at most only slightly better), that slight improvement doesn't really make up for the cost, which is being really slow for a while until you get used to it. Also you're giving up all your plugins. Also, you're giving up universal support in pretty much every other editor, since there are vim bindings in emacs, vscode, visual studio, jet brains ides, xcode, etc. Vim isn't going anywhere, so it just makes more sense for me to continue using it. Maybe for new people they could get into helix? I love that there's more options for people and I hope they can cross-pollinate ideas. But it's a hard sell to be honest.
- plaguepilled 4y ago
  Seems like we agree! I don't think there's much need for people happy with the existing Vim layout to switch, and Vim is still a very serviceable editor. My comment more spoke to my personal tastes around editors. :)
aussiesnack 4y ago
I don't particularly like vim keybindings - actually the very fact that they become so much of a consuming hobby for many people speaks to me of real problems with them. But their availability in so many tools aside from vim/nvim makes them very practical, given things as they are. It's a bit like QWERTY. Ubiquitious presence can be more practically useful than intrinsic advantages.
imbnwa 4y ago
Their absolutely should be more iteration/experimentation on modal editing, its still the right paradigm for coding to me

djaouen 4y ago

Without macros, I won't be switching anytime soon.

AndrewVos 4y ago
You can record macros in helix.
gnuvince 4y ago
It has macros.

exDM69 4y ago

I've used Helix for all my recreational programming projects (in Rust) for about 6 months and I've written about 10kLOC of code with it. Still using vim at $WORK for a variety of reasons (giant c++ codebase that does not easily plug in to clangd/LSP), but I might be doing the switch soon. Installation was easy and the default configuration is good. Plugging in rust-analyzer still needed a line or two of config file editing, but that should not be necessary for very long. Hint: use `hx --health` to check that all the tools are properly installed and configured (it shows a matrix of programming languages and their associated tooling, with red/green check marks). My Helix config file is about 5 lines long, but my Vim config is in the hundreds of lines. I had very little friction coming from Vim and a little bit of Kakoune. I particularly like the fact that all the important features are built-in and not half baked scripts with unintended side effects (e.g. opening a Makefile in Vim triggers a ftplugin script that messes editor-global config instead of buffer-local, with the default out of the box scripts). Lots of people are requesting a plugin extension system, which is kinda understandable since every editor seems to have one. But I haven't had a need to add any kind of plugin, and it's easy enough to fork a shell for an external process if needed. It's still rough around the edges, but good enough for a daily driver. Thanks to everyone working on the project.

eating555 4y ago
I think the fact that helix doesn't really need a plugin/extension system is beautiful. It means that it's simple enough to config yet still powerful. Helix smooth out the learning curve in this good way and I hope it won't become complicated and make learning curve as deep as vim/nvim.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>I've used Helix for all my recreational programming projects (in Rust) for about 6 months and I've written about 10kLOC of code with it. Still using vim at $WORK for a variety of reasons (giant c++ codebase that does not easily plug in to clangd/LSP), but I might be doing the switch soon. Do you have some supernatural ability to quickly (re)learn muscle memory for new keybindings? I’d consider myself a fairly advanced vim user, and it took me literally a couple years to get to the point of fluently using complex navigation/editing commands. I took a look at the Helix documentation, and while it’s definitely “vim inspired,” it’s different enough [0] that I would have to rewire years of muscle memory to be as productive as I am in vim. There are some very fundamental differences, e.g. the verb/object syntax is reversed in Helix; `dw` in vim is `wd` in Helix. When I want to rewrite a string in vim, I unconsciously type `ci"`; it would take me a long time with Helix to regain that level of fluency. [0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Migrating-from-Vim https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Migrating-from-Vi...

rami3l 4y ago

I love to see that Helix tries its best to ensure an out-of-the-box experience, as well as to add so many interactive hints for key combinations (for example when you want to paste in insert mode with C-R it’ll immediately list a set of registers that you can paste from). However Vim is much more to me. It’s not just an editor, but a keybinding that I can use not only in nain, but also in VSCode, in fish shell, and even in GHCi REPL. How long would it take to make them all support (some reasonable subset of) Helix?

rami3l 4y ago
* nain -> nvim

wvh 4y ago

I have been trying out Helix for the last few months as part of my now 24 year quest to incorporate some form of vi into my daily routine. This time, it's looking good. What sets it apart are the (zero-conf) built-in LSP and tree-sitter highlighting, and the select-verb modal keybindings instead of vi's verb-object syntax, where you see what you're about to do before you do it. Some of the key combinations also show a reminder menu, aiding the learning process, which is a nice touch over plain old vi which has zero discoverability. General performance is also very good, the editor feels a lot snappier than a fully loaded Neovim or Doom Emacs, or a monster like Visual Code. I think there are plans to see if a graphical editor could be built on top of it, which would be an interesting project. As a new Rust graphical tree-sitter based editor, it would probably rival the upcoming open-or-not Zed editor by the Atom folks.

mattrighetti 4y ago
Zed is more aimed towards collaborative development at the moment, at least this is how it’s marketed on their website.
fordsmith 4y ago
Man, I don't know what has happened but the spur for new editors has.been delightful. I have been using Zed for a bit since I made it into the closed beta, but it has been very nice to use. VSCode does the job pretty well, but it just feels more clunky to me, and I have hitches quite often. It is not bad, but I want something more performant while giving me the style of vim and emacs. Zed definitely has some rough edges and some sorely missing features (that are being worked on), but it just feels better to use. I know so many people probably discount these projects because of the RIIR meme, but it really has spurred more inovations that we should all be grateful for.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  For the uninitiated: RIIR = Rewrite it in Rust
- dilap 4y ago
  RIIR doesn't scare me at all -- as a user, my experience has been the rust rewrites are usually high-quality improvements over the original. Ripgrep is legendary! It is a huge accomplishment of Rust to enable the creation of better versions of lang-standing highly-optimized-C tools. (Which inspired me to kick the tires a bit on the language; it felt like C++ done right to me. Being able to write threaded code w/o fear of data-races is very cool.)

totetsu 4y ago

how is this pronounced? H E double hocky stix?

nerdponx 4y ago
I assumed it was just the English word "helix", which in AmE is pronounced like "he licks".
bschwindHN 4y ago
Helix? Hellix?

lampe3 4y ago

On of the things with vim/neovim for me what was a deal breaker is that you could not turn off/on LSP's for different projects. So neovim got slow for me. I also don't wanted to copy my config for each project. Does Helix have a solution for this?

nerdponx 4y ago
For what it's worth, you can definitely disable autostart conditionally in nvim-lspconfig, maybe using on_new_config and setting autostart=false therein.

sylware 4y ago

does it compile with the rust-written rust compiler? Do we have elf64 static binaries of this compiler? (with minimal usage of syscalls).

psuresh 4y ago

Does this 'written in Rust, written in Zig, written in Go' make any difference in the user experience? See this often nowadays.

gnulynnux 4y ago
Yes. In my experience, Rust projects are always easy to install. Cargo is much nicer than, say, npm or conda.
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
If "contributing to the project" is part of the user experience then yes.
slazaro 4y ago
I assume, besides looking for contributors, that not being based on Atom or similar is a selling point.
phao 4y ago
Directly, I believe this has more to do with people interested in the language seeing it being used in actual projects. Indirectly (a lot indirectly), sure. Maybe the software should perform better or maybe have fewer bugs because programming language X or Y is understood to help with those things. Maybe it showcases a more flexible architectural design, which leads to more potential features in future versions, etc.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  It also hints at the mindset and values of the creator. Communities around languages value things that may or may not line up with the qualities of the language they form around, but simply the fact they value those things is reflected by rhe things they produce. If people think a language is performant, then performance will be something their community values. If it is known for having a learning curve, their product might too.
- acje 4y ago
  A bit like seeing «car built in carbon fiber”. May poke the interest in materials or imply different quality attributes and design intent.

willeum 4y ago

Tried it a few months ago Felt more responsive than neovim/neovide, and out-of-box was great. However, while the selection > verb scheme conceptually made sense, I noticed it took longer to do many basic text editing functions than it would with vim bindings. Perhaps others had a different experience?

Casperin 4y ago
I've used Helix since February, and vim for 20 years prior. For basic edits it's roughly on par now for me (maybe a bit slower?); but then Helix has really neat tree-sitter integration, so as I'm getting more and more used to that, I find myself jumping around code faster and with more precision. I also never have these moments of fat-fingering a key and then have vim go nuts on me. Like I suddenly deleted half the function and ended up in some mode I've never heard of while doing a recursive recording. ... just mentioning that because I believe (but not sure) that it's because of this selection > verb scheme that I don't ever see that happening in Helix :)

_joel 4y ago

Looks great, I've aliased vim to hx as muscle memory. Will give it a test, I'm guilty of having lots of stuff installed on vim I don't really know how to use (or even vim's full power)

deleted 4y ago

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ziml77 4y ago

I went into this expecting it to be another toy editor that someone was showing off. But no, this thing is legitimately impressive! I had just been messing around with my neovim config because of that Leap plugin that was posted here. I decided to also install and configure the Lua language server because I wanted to try switching away from Vimscript for my init file. Since that file was still fresh in my mind, it was the first thing I opened after installing Helix, and to my surprise it immediately showed me warning markers in the gutter and moving the cursor over the underlined symbol showed the langue server's complaints. I love that it just worked from having the language server installed! Also while messing with neovim yesterday I was thinking about seeing if there was a plugin to show possible operations after pressing the leader key, like what you get with Spacemacs. I decided to try hitting the spacebar in Helix to see what happened and was impressed to see that it popped up with a menu showing how I could continue my input. I'm sure I'll run into annoyances after using it for a while, but damn does this project leave an excellent first impression.

betwixthewires 4y ago

I already use this as my daily driver for everything, especially writing code. Have been using it for a few months. It gets better with every release. I love it. It's got a few quirks. Trying to navigate while in insert mode (I know bad habits die hard) will have you undoing a lot of unintended autocompletes unless you turn LSP off. Tab to complete is a must for autocomplete features, and it should never autocomplete in comments or a completed line of code. So a little rough around the edges, but still wonderful to use.

dm319 4y ago

One of the reasons I love n/vi/m is the ergonomic benefit of using keys that are close to your touch typing position. I'm a bit disappointed that beginning and end of line in helix are home and end.

vulcan01 4y ago
You can also use `gh` and `gl` for start and end of line (and `gs` for first non-whitespace character in line). These options (among others) pop up when using helix and typing `g`.
- dm319 4y ago
  Ok, so in vim I'd type 'd$' as "delete to end of line". What is the equivalent in helix? EDIT: while I'm here, where are the sentence and paragraph movements?
  - Acur 4y ago
    The fastest way to do this in Helix would be `t<Enter>d`. edit: Paragraph and other object movement/selection is done by the `[`, `]` menu. `]p` for the next paragraph. Surrounds are done by the `m` menu.
    - dm319 4y ago
      Thanks, that's helpful. I get it - so 't' is 'to' and enter is new line. Makes sense. The menu under `[` looks good, but very code-focused and lacking sentences. EDIT: I am finding it a bit weird to have 'go to's as different to movements. There isn't a distinction in vim, which is useful. I'm learning that 'ge' will take me to the end of file, but I can't do 'ged' to delete to there.
      - bobbyskelton41 4y ago
        You can do vged. Currently ge takes you to the last line, but there is a change planned to take you to the absolute end.

scblock 4y ago

I gave Helix a try last week and I think there are a lot of things to like about it, but until it supports soft text wrapping for prose documents it's effectively useless to me. I'm not going to bounce back and forth between neovim and helix depending on whether I'm editing code, documentation, or personal notes. The comments on the open issue in Github are not particularly encouraging. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/136 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/136

bobbyskelton41 4y ago
I would say they're pretty encouraging. There's a straightforward path to implement it, and some work is being done on that front.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  As far as I understand from scanning the PR, there's been more than a year of discussion with no actual progress on a basic (if not in this case simple to implement) feature which is universally available in text editors. Helix looks nice in many ways (I installed it last night and have worked with it on a couple of Rust projects today) but it's clearly more of a research project with potential than current practical tool.
  - bobbyskelton41 4y ago
    I wouldn't say so. It's taken so long because it hasn't been a priority for the developers, and nobody else picked it up.

JaggerFoo 4y ago

I've used vi from Linux terminal sessions for more than a decade, and VS Code as a GUI editor now most times when not in a terminal session. Am I missing something not using a GUI vi editor? I came across some dude on YouTube that calls himself "The Primeagen" that swears by VIM, but I couldn't follow his use of it.

seagoj 4y ago

If it had vim key bindings, I might try it, but without them, I don't see how it's worth the effort to switch.

superkuh 4y ago

I don't understand why "in Rust" makes these irrelevant posts somethign worth of the HN frontpage. All it means is that you won't be able to compile it yourself unless you use a fast rolling distro or out of repository tools to get this month's compatible rustc with rustup or curl|sh, etc.

bobbyskelton41 4y ago
It sticks with the MSRV of Firefox, which is currently 1.61.

tiffanyh 4y ago

Some interesting stats: - Helix has 624 open issues (1,103 closed) [0] - Vim has 1,172 open issues (5,518 closed)[1] - NeoVim has 1,258 open issues (7,496 closed)[2] - VSCode has 7,463 open issues (136,638 closed) [3] [0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues [1] https://github.com/vim/vim/issues https://github.com/vim/vim/issues [2] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues [3] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues

darkwinx 4y ago
could you explain what you find interesting from this stats?
deleted 4y ago
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canMarsHaveLife 4y ago

How does it compare to LunarVim (https://www.lunarvim.org https://www.lunarvim.org)?

ar_lan 4y ago
LunarVim is entirely NeoVim with default plugins baked in and maintained. I would translate this back to just debating Helix vs NeoVim.
- canMarsHaveLife 4y ago
  It makes sense.

Protostome 4y ago

I'm a big fan of open source software and have tons of respect for any OSS developer, regardless of the software he/she develops. But I have to say, as a developer who has been taking part in the OSS scence for the last 20 years, it is very strange to me that some developers feel obliged to indicate they wrote a piece of code with Rust. If I'm a user, I care much more that this is a usable software than what kind of programming language was used. For all I care, write it in binary. Rust may be a great programming language, but it is only a mean to an end.

chatterhead 4y ago
Pretty sure the Rust nod is for the HN audience; not just a nebulous end user.
cactus2093 4y ago
I can think of several ways this is useful to know: 1. As OSS software, some users will want to edit the code and add features, and knowing what language it’s written in is a pre-requisite to doing that. 2. The developer community is an important factor in making OSS projects successful. If I’m going to take a chance on a young project, I want to know that it is set up to have a strong community and continue to be improved over time. If it was hand-written in binary or assembly as you suggest, there is no chance it would grow a popular community of developer contributions. 3. Like it or not, different programming language communities have developed around different values in how to build software. The Rust community generally promotes strong type safety that makes entire classes of bugs much less likely which is a plus to me as a user. 4. With editors in particular, the language it’s written in often leaks into the user experience. E.g. Emacs is written and configured in Lisp, Vim has a ton of legacy cruft in the C and vimscript codebase that can make it annoying to compile/install, annoying to build plugins for, and has made modern features like asynchronous tasks difficult to add, which was the whole reason for neovim existing. VSCode has plugins written in JavaScript. Knowing this project is written in Rust gives me some hints that it probably won’t share any of these similarities with these other editors.

phao 4y ago

By the way... which font is being used in the readme screenshot? https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/screenshot.png https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/screenshot...

quic5 4y ago
Looks a lot like JetBrains Mono but I’m not 100% sure

contingencies 4y ago

Low contrast default color scheme = non-starter

Casperin 4y ago
I got you. Put this in your ~/.config/helix/config.toml. theme = "bogster" Or type `:theme` and use tab to cycle through the themes (it'll apply the theme to the current file while you cycle, no need to hit enter).
- contingencies 4y ago
  Thanks. One theme (autumn_night) has a black background. Next up: keys suck. I often use dw or d/something and these fail. Any quick way to resolve?
  - Casperin 4y ago
    No. And I hope there never will be. It's a different editor with its own ideas about how modal editing should be done. It does not sound like that has your interest. That's fine. Stick with vim.

archseer 4y ago

Helix author here: I think the poster chose an unfortunate headline. 1) Helix was written to replace my neovim setup but is in fact kakoune inspired. 2) It's written in Rust but I don't draw focus to it precisely because RiiR/"X in Rust" posts are getting a bit tiring to see.

Casperin 4y ago
Helix is awesome. Thank you for doing this!

conaclos 4y ago

One missing feature for me is a tree view of the project folder [1]. A contributor is working on that [2]. [1] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/200 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/200 [2] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/2377 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/2377

SuperSandro2000 4y ago

Yet another editor :shrug:

barrenko 4y ago

Can someone help me with how to make a caret in insert mode to line instead of block? Most themes are just block cursor both in "read" and insert mode, hurts visibility.