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Comment by ldelossa | Hacker News Reader

All we want is a tree explorer :'(

That's probably not going to happen as part of the core editor (there's a long discussion about this somewhere on the bug tracker) but should be easy to add using the now work-in-progress plugin system. Scroll down to the Examples section.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675

There's already a plugin for it: https://github.com/mattwparas/helix-config/blob/master/cogs/...

Funny how the maintainers preferred to build a plugin system instead of just the tree explorer, I suspect Helix will lose its biggest feature: no plugins and easy configuration :(

Configuration with scheme looks like it would be pretty similar. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/10441

I used to use tree explorers all the time, but once I discovered fuzzy-search file explorers, I never used a tree explorer again. It’s been too long for me to remember why I liked tree explorers before or why I stopped using them, so I’m curious, what are the benefits of a tree explorer over a fuzzy-search file explorer?

I’m not questioning the usefulness or validity of tree explorers. I’m just trying to see things from a different perspective.

Tbh, I like having both, I find a fuzzy search is faster at finding what I want but a file tree is really helpful for building a mental model of directory relationships in a complex project.

Tree-based finders allow you to explore a project.

Fuzzy finders only work when you already know what files exist.

Without a tree-based finder, you have no way to know which files exist in an unfamiliar project. Imagine being asked to change something in a project (e.g. add some extra space between two things on screen) without knowing what files existed. If you only rely on searching for names/terms that come to mind, you're probably going to miss the best way to accomplish the task at hand.

For discovering files in an unknown codebase I use the grep feature in Helix (or just ripgrep CLI). Way faster than going through a tree in most cases.

Can you give an example of how it is faster than a tree?

How would it work if you don't know the names of all the files or directories?

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