this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Helix - A modal text editor (helix-editor.com)
submitted 1 year ago by Fryboyter@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Helix does not aim to be a better vim / neovim. Thus, for example, there are officially no vim bindings and Helix follows the selection → action model. Helix is also a relatively new project.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Differences-from

https://docs.helix-editor.com/title-page.html

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[–] zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I sometimes play around with Helix and I almost always have a good time, but there are too many vim features that I have integrated in my workflow that there isn't any good equivalent to in Helix. I use ex commands, the quickfix list, snippets, the fugitive plugin and just little custom commands and mappings that I've accumulated. I don't see myself switching to any editor full time that doesn't have a replacement for most of these features, but Helix is very nice and fun to use occasionally.

[–] nous@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ex commands

Are these for scripting outside of vim (but using vim)? If so you can probably still use these with vim and helix for interactive editing. Unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by that feature.

quickfix list

<space>d (current file) and <space>D open a window of issues as reported by the current LSP which you can use to jump to the selected issue (with fuzzy filtering).

snippets

Looks like there is some basic support for lsp snippets which looks like you can add your own but a wider issue for better snippet support is being tracked here. So not ideal yet, but will hopefully improve over time.

fugitive plugin

It does have git gutter support and the :reset-diff-change command currently. And you can run git commands with :sh git ... though that experience could be improved. Staging changes is still pending here as is diffing changes here which look like there is work slowly being done on these.

So there are some workarounds for some of the things you need - and improvements being made to those that are missing. Might take some time for these areas to improve though and it depends on how you use those features as if/when things are good enough for your usecase.

[–] zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

There are many cases I actually prefer the quickfix list to an interactive picker:

  • When working on a very large project, such as my $DAYJOB, interactiveness gets in the way more than it helps if you're running a slow command (like greping a large number of files)
  • You can use :Cfilter to filter things matched in the quickfix list and :colder/:cnewer to navigate the history of the quickfix list without having to rerun the command
  • You can run ex commands on the items in the quickfix list, like :cdo norm gcc to comment the matched lines (with the vim-commentary plugin), run a macro with :cdo norm @q, or :cdo yank A to put all the matched lines in the a register for example. You can also do stuff like :cdo -10,+10g/re/p to print all lines matching some regular expression re within the range of 10 lines before to 10 lines after the match.
  • You can put more things in the quickfix list than you can with interactive pickers, like :Git diftool to get diffs. Vim also has support for parsing the output of many compilers and linting tools so you can use e.g. :compiler cargo followed by :make to build the current project with cargo and get any build errors in the quickfix list.

In short, interactive pickers are better for browsing, but the quickfix list is better for scipting and holding on to data for longer without having to rerun commands, and can with some basic scripting be used for more things.

Afaik helix doesn't have diff capabilities which is also a major thing missing from my git workflow.

I expect some of these things to make it into helix eventually, particularly git stuff, but I would be surprised if they add support for more weird janky vim stuff like the quickfix list and ex commands, which is a valid design decision, but they are also very useful tools once you get your head around them.