Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatheticonion | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'd love a terminal based editor/IDE that is essentially a shameless clone of VSCode.

nvim showed me that it's possible, with mouse events, right-click context menus, and a rich editing experience. I did genuinely try to transition to nvim but I use my mouse a lot; resizing panels, using the file tree, copy/cut/pasting files in the file browser, tabs, etc.

That's not to say nvim is bad, but after hours of configuration, I personally found myself less productive with it when compared to VSCode - however VSCode is bloated, slow, uses a lot of RAM, and SSH functionality is unreliable.

I actually started writing this as a side project - using Rust, ratatui and a plugin system based on wasm (and dynamic C libs), but you know how side projects go

View on HN

I had a similar experience. I liked nvim for simple editing, but not for anything multi-file. And then I found Helix, and I never looked back. I only hop into vscode if I want a Jupyter notebook.

Thanks for the recommendation. Just looked it up, I'll give it a try!

EDIT: https://helix-editor.com/

I love that the homepage has a video showing usage. Such a great way to demonstrate it.

I do my full-time development work using Neovide (a GUI frontend to nvim) over SSH. As a long-time vim user, this is great for me, but I will freely admit that it is nowhere near as easy to set up as VSCode, and it is also fundamentally a dumb client over SSH, so it suffers from lag spikes. There has been some discussion about what a smart client version of nvim would look like, but it's probably years out: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/24690

I remember many years ago looking into mouse events over terminal and in that time you could only handle clicks, you couldn't track cursor position so dragging would be impossible. So I was curious to hear about someone actually making a usable mouse UI in a terminal.

As I do some googling it seems like there is now better support for that.

Kakoune has network-transparency - you can run the editor server on a remote system and run editor clients locally, communicating only via Unix socket.

Have you tried Zed?

Yes I have. Last time I tried it, it didn't have SSH support (I'm on a MBP so my life involves around remote development tooling).

I'll take a look again

I use Zed with SSH support daily, most often to SSH into a distrobox dev container running on localhost. It's a little jank but it works great for the most part.

Note that Zed has the aforementioned concern around downloading a remote binary as well. In my case this isn't an issue, since the distrobox container is not a security boundary of any kind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com