Helix the Rust Powered Development Environment

Vim is overrated, Notepad++ clears

Helix is my favorite text editor now.

Great video! I keep watching Helix content and playing with it and the thought I'm left with is "hmm this is basically neovim with no additional plugins available, and an opinionated refreshing look on normal/visual mode, that can easily be a neovim plugin..."
So I'm thinking of Helix as a fully baked kickstarter neovim falvor with a slightly different approach to motions.
Even the mentioned move between functions and structs is becoming very popular with text objects used by (most?) of the neovim community.

What do you think?
It kind of blows my mind that someone would sit an re-write Neovim from the ground in Rust just for that one tweak...

Thanks

So I'm curious about the "out of the box" syntax highlighting. On my machine I did have to install an lsp, but helix did recognize it without any configuration. I'm assuming you already had rust-analyzer installed? I bring this up because it was a point of confusion for me when trying this for the first time. This video is honestly a great reference.

I'm on my first steps on Odin Project. This stuff will be very useful soon. Thanks.
This geometric animated desktop of yours is awesome. Would you mind to tell how to do it?
Big hug from Brazil. Thanks for the vídeos.

I am very interested in learning a modal editor, but every time I try, it seem so daunting and overwhelming, I have to give up because I simply don't have time to spend relearning how to use an editor. One day, though.

He licks deez nuts

What font are you using?

I dropped it when you mentioned x highlights the line. Simply remapping long established vim commands for something as non sensical as highlighting is a level of retardation I will not subject myself to.

What is the startup time? 😊

why not use vs code with keybindings?

Sadly Helix does not have git support

Thx for the video :) earned a subscribe, i am using vscode for the moment but when working on rust projects the formatting sucks and i get comflicts with other extensions. I will try this out thx :)

usually love rust stuff, but this is hot trash.

There's one downside to using Helix in 2023 and beyond. The maintainer doesn't want to include support for tools like copilot because it's a commercial offering. It's something that seems really important now.

I only just started using vim/neovim. Should I switch to helix before my muscle memory settles in?

I regret to express my frustration with the Helix text editor. I attempted to install it on a Docker image, utilizing either Alpine Linux or Arch Linux. The installation process for Helix was straightforward, which is commendable. However, I ran into trouble when I tried to utilize the 'f' command for the search function, which caused the entire system to freeze.

When I tried the same operation using Alpine Linux, the outcome was identical - the 'f' and 'F' commands for search caused the Docker images to freeze. In contrast, Vim and NeoVim worked flawlessly without causing any issues.

Unfortunately, my experiences with the Helix editor were less than satisfactory. Within a span of three minutes, I encountered significant functionality issues. This is a humble plea to the development team to take these issues into consideration and work on improving the editor's stability and reliability.

Man, you have probably shown me the editor I was dreaming of! Giving it a solid shot, hope it works well with JS/TS projects

"Non-graphical" does not imply "no mouse". This is an excuse for CLI devs who don't know GUI programming.

The only thing I want is file tree,fuzzy finder require to type alot more,and not quite good for visualizing

Helix seems interesting, but I find all of the interesting stuff comes from kakoune, so that's what I use.

Helix approach to selections is very similar to meow mode in emacs. I wonder if the meow mode author was inspired by Helix.

So complicated 😢

Do you find it more productive?

It's great at what it does do, but I ultimately quit using it because there is no integrated terminal and no copilot support(as silly as it sounds, both is important for me, I use windows sometimes, so there is no tmux or whatnot, copilot is a massive help for boilerplate).

It seems to be built like an IDE rather than a text editor which is really nice. Since vim/neovim are text editors that you can extend, this seems to be an IDE that you can extend.

Thanks for the video!

nothing can replace neovim atleast for now

I wish I knew how it was possible to remember 100's of keybindings like this.
I would have to print them all out & plaster all over my walls (which defeats the purpose, as I would be 100x slower).
Guess I am just slow.. lol

you're going tooooooo fast.

Thanks for this, Helix needs more people backing it up. It's an absolute joy to use.

Could you pls do a video on configuring language server? Specifically Java language support

One thing that kind of bothers me is that you must select before doing an action. The very first thing that drew me closer to Vim was "dw" or "d3w" because I really think about it in that order.

it's super counter-intuitive to first select with w and then delete with d. I don't think "word delete", but I do think "delete word" once I want to perform such action.

Also, if 'x' is Shift + V, how do you delete a single character? I hope it's not "move to select a character and then press d".

Also since CTRL + V is Vertical Split, does "Visual Block Mode" exist in Heilx?

Also, what about the comand line? How does that work?
What about macros?

Also does diw or da[ exist in Helix? Does ci" in the beginning on the line makes cursor delete everything in the closest pair of quotes and puts you in INSERT mode?

What about CTRL+a and CTRL+x?

if letter 'g' means something different in Helix, how do you go down or up a wrapped line? gj and gk are pretty handy.

Great video. Thanks for showing this. It's awesome that more and more environments have modals in them.

Do you still use Helix or went back to neovim?

hey thanks for sharing. really appreciate it.
do you use helix in daily programming activities?

Excellent video! Keep up the great work!

I would argue that debugging is the killer feature of visual editors. How does helix handle debugging

I just stumbled upon Helix and was curious to what it can do. I just wanted to let everyone know that; As a new user to vim/neovim I found this EXTREMELY easier to use compared to vim. It took me 2 days to configure vim, you may call out my intellectual here if you want. Coming from vscode and jetbrains, I knew I wanted something that improved my productivity to programming. and Vim was it...until I found Helix. thanks for the video, this is going to be my new editor.

I would love to see a scientific study to investigate the claim that non-graphical editors are more productive than graphical ones.

For example, take a representative group of beginner, experienced and veteran users for both, then give both groups representative work and measure how long they take.

My gut feeling is that it will likely be that in the beginner bracket, graphical editors will show a clear advantage. In the experienced bracket, graphical will still have a slight but less noticeable advantage. And in the veteran bracket, non-graphical will show a slight but noticeable advantage.

Installed it: tried to fetch grammars, the fetch failed.
Stdout:
Stderr: error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:
I tried again. It fails because of a branch switch and it can not override changes. It does not log where it is checking out those files. I tried to find them. I did not find them. Gave up. Back to neovim in less than an hour.

20 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;
21 That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
22 And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
23 I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.
24 Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.
25 O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.
26 And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.
(Jn.17:20-26)

I wish I could switch back to helix (it was my first tui text editor), but I cannot handle two sets of keybindings at once. and I need to use neovim because vim is the only text editors on things I ssh into

That ctrl+n ctrl+p for navigating forward and backward is not ergonomic (at least for me)
Why can't you just use normal hjkl motions?

had no idea how to open it lmao, and seems like the correct introduction to nonGUI IDE!

I just started using Helix last week, so glad I found this video

I tried Helix out for a bit when I first saw this video a few weeks ago. I thought it did some cool stuff but I stuck to vim. Today, I ditched vim. Love for the OG but Helix is just far more ergonomic to me.

Certainly better than vim, but still not comparable with the Intellij platform. Nice text editor for the terminal, but I would not use it for any serious development.