[jvican]

I've fallen in love with Helix and now use it for everything. Moved from neovim and VS Code to Helix for the majority of my coding.

For me, after trying the Lazy neovim plugin distro and being a long-time vim user, Helix fills a unique need:

- It's beautiful (lots of attention to detail) - It's fast (meaning: at no point did I think Helix is slower than it should) - It's hugely ergonomic (each default keystroke resonates with me and the modal selection is a boon for my brain and productivity) - It requires almost no configuration out-of-the-box

I can't be bothered to use neovim and configure it, and vim doesn't cut it. I need something in the middle between nvim and VS Code, and that's Helix for me. This might have been different had I been a vimscript wizard, which I'm not.

I don't need Helix to be more modular or UNIXy, I simply need it to keep on the direction they've taken. There's a thriving ecosystem of tools around it, and I can use it with Claude Code (by simply refreshing the buffer when there's a new edit). What else can I ask for?

Helix is a great editor, one of the very best I've ever used. As a result, I started chipping in monthly money to keep the project going.

In terms of future improvements, the only one I'm missing the most is the ability to render images or math formulas from the editor, which I hope can at some point be done through a plugin using Kitty's terminal protocol or sixel. This is especially handy when working on Markdown files for notes or blog posts.

Long live Helix.

[weinzierl]

All of this plus that with their approach of shipping an editor that is useable out of the box I feel a lot safer from supply chain attacks.

No matter if VSCode or (neo)vim, needing tens of plugins from almost that many different parties always made me feel quite uneasy.

[christophilus]

Their cargo.lock file is 3500 lines or so: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/Cargo.lock

So, I kind of agree with you, but that’s still a lot of dependencies baked into the editor. It’s probably not as bad as Neovim+plugins, but it’s still a supply chain issue.

[eviks]

But once helix adds plugins it will be exactly the same because those tens of VSCode plugins provide functionality not present in helix, so will be similarly implemented externally

[lawn]

> This might have been different had I been a vimscript wizard, which I'm not.

You mean Lua wizard (for Neovim).

[eptcyka]

At least lua is a real language, i.e. a language used by more than just vim.

[jack_pp]

If you need something between nvim and vscode what's the issue with using vscode with vim plugin?

[joshcsimmons]

I enjoy helix but don’t write nvim off entirely. I’m not much of a lua dev but llms have proven themselves to be excellent when writing and modifying nvim configs.

IMO that was the biggest motivator to switch was helix’s well put together lsp/lint config.