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Comment by alxmng | Hacker News Reader

This is really great.

I’ve recently switched to Helix editor after 10 years of vim and haven’t looked back. If you’re looking for something a bit simpler, zero configuration, but with the same philosophy as vim (select -> action) give it a try.

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What annoyed me with helix was that invisible characters are treated the same as characters. That means your cursor can be positioned after the end of the line, on the '\n' and just sit there.

For instance, if you press "A", you are now after the \n of the end of line, and pressing backspace will remove the \n, joining with the line below.

I tried to ask whether that peculiar behavior could be toggled off somehow, but was welcomed by a wall of extreme purism on how treating differently visible and invisible characters would break the character model of the editor...

I'm too old to entertain the argument, and will just stick back to vim. Maybe its character model is unpure, but at least it's understandable by a mere mortal like me.

There is a pending pull request partially addressing this:

    https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/4204

It would be nice to have a comprehensive and convincing explanation in the documentation which sheds lights at the advantages of helix's treating lines. Maybe we vim old timers could learn something new and make a more informed decision about switching to helix.

Treating newlines as regular characters allows you to use them in motions: t<Enter> will select text until end of the line for example.

> with the same philosophy as vim (select -> action)

"select->action" is definitely possible thanks to visual mode but it certainly is not Vim's "philosophy", which would be more in the line of "action->object".

Ha yes, I meant to say opposite philosophy, ugh. Vim is command -> object but Helix it’s the other way around. In Helix you select first then do something.

Zero configuration sounds like the opposite of why I like vim. I want things to work exactly how I want them to work. Vim’s composability of normal, day-to-day actions you already know is its best feature

Im also in the process of switching to Helix and Zellij. I like the minimal configuration of Helix compared to going through multiple git repos just to find the needed neovim config and adjust them to taste.

Holy cow I switch to Helix a couple months ago but its my first time hearing about Zellij and wow this is too powerful with Helix! thank you so much for this!!!!!

Zellij just looks like Tmux with tabs. Am I missing something?

Yes: https://zellij.dev/tutorials/basic-functionality/

> with the same philosophy as vim (select -> action)

but Vim is not select -> action?

say `d2w` (to delete two words after the cursor) it's action then selection

But the massive plugin ecosystem and the endless configuration possibilities is part of the charm!

Are there any good VSCode extensions that support helix-style input?

Yes, you'll have to tweak the default keybindings a bit to match Helix but I am using dance successfully:

https://github.com/71/dance

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