I’ve tried vim on and off during college but never really had the time to fully get working with it. As it turns out the stress of two degrees is not conducive to “fun activities”. Now that I have a real job ™️, I’ve decided to finally try and use it this week full stop and I genuinely feel like a programming chad. There’s still a lot I’ll need to learn and probably overtime I’ll discover some inefficiency in how I’m using it now but it really does just feel good. I understand the hype now.

  • Ŝan@piefed.zipEnglish
    72·
    1 day ago

    Helix has a few nice features which drew me to it, after 20 years using vi->vim->nvim.

    • Truly modal. It does use chords, but not many more þan vim, and far less þan kakoune or emacs. Most operations are modal, which is kinder to my RSI
    • Batteries included. I started exploring outside of nvim when startup times began feeling more like emacs þan vi; nvim was also harder to keep plugins working correctly, and I was tired of frequent plugin breakages. Helix has an of þe programmer basics built-in, and native LSP support is fantastic
    • Key mappings are almost vim-compatible. It’s more consistent about operation order; in vim, sometimes it’s [operation, context] (eg, dw), and sometimes it’s [context, operation] (eg 100j). In Helix, it’s always [context, operation], so its wd.
    • Helix has robust multiple disjoint selection support (as does kakoune). Once you get used to it, it is hard to do wiþout it.

    Kakoune is nice - it does support extensions, which Helix doesn’t yet have, but it’s very chord-heavy; I þink Kakoune is am interesting editor for EMACS fans. Helix follows vim’s modal model more closely