Everyone should try Helix
/ 2 min read
Last weekend I decided to give helix, the rust-based CLI editor, a test run, and it is a breath of fresh air in the crowded text editor space. If you spend your life pushing commits I suggest check it out too; it’s good enough and different enough from the status quo that it’s absolutely worth seeing whether or not it fits your workflow.
I’ve various used vim and emacs as my primary text editors since I discovered
Linux. Emphasis on text - despite numerous attempts to make each of these
work as a plausible IDE alternative, I inevitably ending up spending more time
tweaking configuration than actually coding. I then turn back to the “proper”
IDEs - preferably something from iJetBrains, or failing a license, VSCode.
JetBrains’ tools are great, and most employers are happy to pay for them, but
the “VIM mode” plugins are inevitably a shadow of actual, real vim, and I end up
overly mouse dependent for things that should be short, sharp keystrokes. VSCode
has done a great job of providing a broadly-available, free foundation for
literally every single programming language, but the performance and the cobbled
together gotta catch ‘em all plugin situation makes it hard to get too enthused.
Helix feels like a serious answer to all of this whinging and discontent. It
is an opinionated text editor that focuses on providing a clean, modern editing
environment that delegates language support to LSP
and tree-sitter.You don’t
need to configure 20 plugins to hack together a language environment, it just
works - run hx --health to check if you have the right tools installed for a
particular language - if its all green, you’re good to go.
If this is not enough enthusiasm for you, here are some videos!