Trying Helix
After reading Julia Evans's latest post on switching from Vim to Helix and all the positive commentary on HN, I'm giving it a shot.
I'm amusing myself here, because I very recently gave Vim another go and then quickly bailed on that experiment. Moreover, my old Obsidian note on Helix opened with the frank conclusion: "Too different from Vim for me to bother with. Peeps said it took about a month to get comfortable. Hard to justify. " On top of that, I don't write much code anymore, and when I do, I'm mostly happy with VSCode.
So, why bother?
- For fun, of course.
- To learn something new and stretch the ol' brains.
- I've been provoked by reading a critical mass of praise about Helix.
- Because I do like having a fast, terminal-based
$EDITORwhen I don't want to fire up a heavyweight IDE. - Because Helix has a lot of batteries included and UX niceties that Vim lacks without futzy configuration. For example:
- I just added bullets to each of these lines using Helix's native multiple-cursor support. 🤗 I love multiple cursors!
- Native surround functionality (see Match mode).
- Native easymotion movements (see go to word in Goto mode).
- Lots more. I've been at this only a handful of minutes.
- Because Helix's select-first approach resonates with how I tend to work with text.
- Mostly see above re: fun.
I'm writing this post in Helix, and it's definitely slow going compared to Obsidian or iA Writer. But it's fun! And I'm learning a bunch of cool features and tricks along the way. Even if I bail on Helix in the next few days, I'll at least have a better-informed opinion of it.