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Comment by Lyngbakr | Hacker News Reader

I'm a happy Helix user and I'm curious what the benefit is of this over terminal-based Helix?

In general, the benefit of a UI would be that you can draw things you can't draw when constrained to a grid of characters, and you can have interactivity you couldn't otherwise have. It would be more like VS Code or Zed but with the Helix editing model underneath.

(Worth noting one of the maintainers said only a couple months ago: "this is really far away right now as helix needs large architectural changes before writing a GUI is even feasible/a good idea."[1])

[1]: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/39#issuecomment...

Ah, I see. Would this come at a performance cost? (My only experience with GUI editors is VSCode, which feels sluggish compared to Helix.)

Not necessarily. Zed is designed to be very fast. Worth looking into. https://zed.dev/

Both VS Code and Zed have pretty comprehensive (and in the case of VS Code, widely used) Vim modes, so it would really be quite a lot like that.

+1 for Zed [running in vim mode]. It has best-in-class tree-sitter and LSP support (not unsurprising since Max Brunsfeld of tree-sitter fame is one of the founders).

Arguably native drawing should be faster than going through terminal subsystem, all other things being equal.

if anything GUI's should be significantly faster (well, I say significantly, but a well optimized GUI app and a well optimized Terminal + TUI app would probably have near imperceptible latency today anyways)

Another benefit that hasn't been mentioned yet is menu bars (e.g. File, Edit, View, Help, etc...)

Having a visible menu bar helps with feature discoverability.

While it's true that terminal-based editors can have menu bars (e.g. nano), they're more limited overall than what you'll find with native OS menu bars.

What's the limit over native?

To start, terminal editors are limited to text rendering.

But native menus can have buttons, dropdowns, and input boxes.

Also, native menus are more readily explorable by users which teaches them what's possible. It places related functions near each other so the user can be aware of a function that's more applicable to their task at hand rather than the function they would have picked otherwise.

The native menus also include keyboard shortcut indicators and command pallet features which speed up a user's transition into a power user. You can see both here, the user types something in the search box at the top right, and then the relevant menu opens to reveal itself, related features, and keyboard shortcuts: https://images.macrumors.com/t/1nSQeW8SNfCYItiL2GsvvDYL1w0=/...

Except for the text limit you can have all the input boxes and groups and shortcuts etc in a custom app menu etc

And the image shows macos menu, you don't get that on Windows

(wondering, can a terminal app edit Mac menu via its terminal emulator gui app?)

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