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This has been my main editor for prose and code for a few years now (Sublime Text -> Atom -> Vim -> Helix). Overall, it has been great. Many LSPs work almost ou

This has been my main editor for prose and code for a few years now (Sublime Text -> Atom -> Vim -> Helix). Overall, it has been great. Many LSPs work almost out-of-the-box, and my config is a fraction the size of my old .vimrc. Surprisingly, it didn’t take that long to update my Vim muscle memory. Days or weeks, maybe? However, I still have mixed feelings about modal editors in general, and most of my gripes with Helix are actually about modal editors and/or console editors in general. Code folding is a feature I’m still waiting for.

wilkystyle 7mo ago
Curious to hear your gripes about modal editors! I'm a long time Emacs user (traditional keybindings, not evil-mode), but I also started using Vim in parallel a little over a decade ago. I feel very proficient/productive in both, regularly using many of Vim's more advanced motions and functionality. I generally love the power and composability of Vim text objects, and definitely experience the benefit of using them. But there are some times where I am doing things like many small edits within a line where rapidly changing modes for all of the edits starts to feel cumbersome. For Emacs, I use multiple cursors and a treesitter-based plug-in for incrementally expanding or reducing the selection by text objects. I also have a collection of my own helper functions for working with text that make my non-modal Emacs approach still feel very comparable to the power of manipulating text in Vim. Curious to hear if your issues with modal editing are similar.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- Curiositry 7mo ago
  - It feels like I know all the efficient keybindings, but when someone looks over my shoulder, I become conscious of how much time I spend mashing Esc/CapsLock and i/I/a/A/o/O, compared to how much editing actually happens. - I have nomouse mode on, to try to learn modal editors properly. But the mouse is actually fairly fast for getting to a specific cursor position. In theory, using Helix motions could be faster (and there's gw if I don't know what motion to use). In practice, the mental process of turning a point on the coordinate plane into the correct series of motions (including i) feels vastly slower. Still, Vim, Helix, etc are incredible for structural manipulation of text, and I miss what they provide any time I edit text somewhere else, even with the universal keybindings that are available for navigating/selecting/deleting words, lines, etc. I tried Vim mode in Zed and it just didn't cut it. Some things about Helix that I particularly like: speed and stability (no weird lag on visual block insert!), the jump to diagnostics/changes pattern (]d <Space>a is a surprisingly nice spellcheck interface, with <Space>d for the overview), the jumplist, and the good-by-default fuzzy pickers.
cassepipe 7mo ago
My main gripe with modal editors is that they still use the Escape key to go back to normal mode even though Escape was chosen for historical reasons (used to sit much much closer to the home row on older Unix Keyboards) In Linux and MacOs I can change it with just one gui setting but it's still annoying how everyone went with it. It's not mentionned in most vim tutorials. According to a vim reddit poll, at least half of the users are just using Escape where it is now instead of one of the alternatives. This is beyond me, it feels like someone inventing glasses in order to see better but everyone settled on cast iron frames.
- andrewl 7mo ago
  Cassepipe, it’s not a great default for sure. What do you have yours mapped to? I mapped jj to return to normal mode and also save my file. So, as I’m typing, I just hit jj, the jj vanishes, and this command is run: <Esc>:w<CR> I could just have it escape instead without saving. If I hadn’t chose jj it would have been ff, which is also always under an index finger. I do wish I’d been clued into the idea when I started with Vim instead of two years later.
  - cassepipe 7mo ago
    I find the jj/jk hack a bit too clever for my taste. I just map CapsLock to Escape system-wide because it also unlocks quick escaping for shells vi-modes too and I realized that actually Escape is a really nice key to have around in a lot of UIs to get out/go back/cancel what you are doing. I also like that it's a simple gui setting away (or registry key editing in windows). I either put CapsLock where Escape sits or use both shifts simultaneously (one cancels it) but even then I almost never use it. The rare times I need to type a lot of uppercase together is generally code in vim and visual selection + gU does the job. The point of my comment was not to shill for a particular solution though but for the vim community to acknowledge the problem publicly instead of it being some insider knowledge you discover in a random internet comment six months into fighting vim (if you haven't dropped out yet)
    - zargon 7mo ago
the_killer 7mo ago
[flagged]

wilkystyle 7mo ago

Curious to hear your gripes about modal editors! I'm a long time Emacs user (traditional keybindings, not evil-mode), but I also started using Vim in parallel a little over a decade ago. I feel very proficient/productive in both, regularly using many of Vim's more advanced motions and functionality. I generally love the power and composability of Vim text objects, and definitely experience the benefit of using them. But there are some times where I am doing things like many small edits within a line where rapidly changing modes for all of the edits starts to feel cumbersome. For Emacs, I use multiple cursors and a treesitter-based plug-in for incrementally expanding or reducing the selection by text objects. I also have a collection of my own helper functions for working with text that make my non-modal Emacs approach still feel very comparable to the power of manipulating text in Vim. Curious to hear if your issues with modal editing are similar.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Curiositry 7mo ago
- It feels like I know all the efficient keybindings, but when someone looks over my shoulder, I become conscious of how much time I spend mashing Esc/CapsLock and i/I/a/A/o/O, compared to how much editing actually happens. - I have nomouse mode on, to try to learn modal editors properly. But the mouse is actually fairly fast for getting to a specific cursor position. In theory, using Helix motions could be faster (and there's gw if I don't know what motion to use). In practice, the mental process of turning a point on the coordinate plane into the correct series of motions (including i) feels vastly slower. Still, Vim, Helix, etc are incredible for structural manipulation of text, and I miss what they provide any time I edit text somewhere else, even with the universal keybindings that are available for navigating/selecting/deleting words, lines, etc. I tried Vim mode in Zed and it just didn't cut it. Some things about Helix that I particularly like: speed and stability (no weird lag on visual block insert!), the jump to diagnostics/changes pattern (]d <Space>a is a surprisingly nice spellcheck interface, with <Space>d for the overview), the jumplist, and the good-by-default fuzzy pickers.

cassepipe 7mo ago

My main gripe with modal editors is that they still use the Escape key to go back to normal mode even though Escape was chosen for historical reasons (used to sit much much closer to the home row on older Unix Keyboards) In Linux and MacOs I can change it with just one gui setting but it's still annoying how everyone went with it. It's not mentionned in most vim tutorials. According to a vim reddit poll, at least half of the users are just using Escape where it is now instead of one of the alternatives. This is beyond me, it feels like someone inventing glasses in order to see better but everyone settled on cast iron frames.

andrewl 7mo ago
Cassepipe, it’s not a great default for sure. What do you have yours mapped to? I mapped jj to return to normal mode and also save my file. So, as I’m typing, I just hit jj, the jj vanishes, and this command is run: <Esc>:w<CR> I could just have it escape instead without saving. If I hadn’t chose jj it would have been ff, which is also always under an index finger. I do wish I’d been clued into the idea when I started with Vim instead of two years later.
- cassepipe 7mo ago
  I find the jj/jk hack a bit too clever for my taste. I just map CapsLock to Escape system-wide because it also unlocks quick escaping for shells vi-modes too and I realized that actually Escape is a really nice key to have around in a lot of UIs to get out/go back/cancel what you are doing. I also like that it's a simple gui setting away (or registry key editing in windows). I either put CapsLock where Escape sits or use both shifts simultaneously (one cancels it) but even then I almost never use it. The rare times I need to type a lot of uppercase together is generally code in vim and visual selection + gU does the job. The point of my comment was not to shill for a particular solution though but for the vim community to acknowledge the problem publicly instead of it being some insider knowledge you discover in a random internet comment six months into fighting vim (if you haven't dropped out yet)
  - zargon 7mo ago

the_killer 7mo ago

[flagged]