Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudomateo | Hacker News Reader

This article put into words what I felt when I decided to stop using Neovim and start using Helix.

It's exhausting fixing broken plugins after an update and wading through the dozens of Lua configuration files to add support for a new language.

I enjoy Neovim's ability to be customized but I very much enjoy the out of the box experience with Helix.

View on HN

This is what Helix did right - putting essentials into the core. I'm still not sold on their editing model, even as someone new to modal editing and not encumbered by existing habits. The improvement is not that dramatic to justify abandoning the vim keymaps which you have in every editor. Also, it is missing features like debugger or git integration, so I will stick with Neovim for now. I do like, though, that they are choosing Scheme for extension language. That alone may convince me to switch in the future.

I agree. Helix has been the first TUI editor that I have been able to be productive on. With Emacs, vim and neovim, there was so much fiddling just to get started. And the more functionality I added, the slower and bigger the editors became, so I kept going back to the JetBrains suite and vscode.

With Helix, it was love at first sight. I like how discoverable its UI is. I prefer the modal approach of Helix where movement goes first, so that I can see over what what and where my action will take place. I like not having to fiddle with plugins. I like the defaults, meaning my config file fits on my screen and there's still vertical space to spare.

Helix is amazing and so portable, I switched entirely off graphical ides to it when I started needing to do dev from multiple machines and couldn't keep my files synced on the dev server with any of the graphical ides and after I tried neovim for a couple weeks and found it difficult to maintain. Now I just mosh to the machine > source my venv when necessary > hx

I did the same and don't regret it. My Helix config is 4 lines and it does 95% of what I want. The performance of a ton of neovim plugins is also atrocious and I always hated that everything was a hodgepodge mix of C, vimscript and Lua.

It's kind of wild, I developed some bash/python to automate saving workspaces and my editor config is still 6 lines

Same here except I'm using Zed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com