>>Post-modern?!

>It's a joke. If Neovim is the modern Vim, then Helix is post-modern.

It's interesting that postmodern is so often used by people, perhaps less familiar with the arts and the humanities, to mean "an update to modern" or a progression thereof. They use it in a strictly literal sense, eschewing the precise meaning of the term they're referencing by mere addition of discontinuity as incremental difference.

Obviously, there's little impact to this. The term is hardly degraded by engineers advertising to other engineers. It looks a touch unread, but then again we have people like Thiel and Luckey misinterpreting Tolkien, so again it's hardly the most egregious example. I guess it just jumped out to me because I was hoping to see something creative truly postmodern.

Surprisingly, it didn’t take that long to update my Vim muscle memory. Days or weeks, maybe? However, I still have mixed feelings about modal editors in general, and most of my gripes with Helix are actually about modal editors and/or console editors in general.

Code folding is a feature I’m still waiting for.

"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out."

Helix carries a baggage of ideas from Vim. It does not have consistent and transferable keybinds. It does not have composition of ideas:

You can move to the next line in the buffer editor with `k` but to move down to the next line in the file explorer you have to do `ctrl+n`?

Vim is like C, Helix is like C++ and Ki Editor is like Rust.

I do find Helix very impressive. I remember the Python LSP working without any configuration whatsoever.

However, I have vim muscle memory built over 25 years of use. I already struggle switching between Emacs and vim (or its equivalents) - for example, after a period of vim usage, I would press ESC repeatedly in Emacs, three of which are enough close a window. While Helix borrows modal editing from vim, it introduces subtle (and meaningful - I have to admit) variations, which unfortunately wreaks havoc with my muscle memory. Maybe the worst part about muscle memory is that unlearning is almost impossible. My dilemma, not Helix's fault...

However, after a few weeks, I ended up rewriting things to be more classic VIM-like after all. This might have just been muscle memory refusing to yield, I am not sure. One thing I remember though, was that the multi-cursor+selection approach only really helps when you can see everything you're about to change on the screen. For large edits, most selections will be out of the scroll window and not really helping.

I still haven't written it off completely, though with AI I increasingly find myself writing more prose than keywords and brackets, so I am not sure it's going to feel worth it.

For the curious: https://github.com/seg6/dotfiles/blob/1281626127dfbf584c2939...

As long as helix doesn’t add a plugin system I think both are superior to neovim. Neovim defaults are just awful. I hate that quickfix and loclist are so close to being useful for pickers but it just misses the mark and now there’s lock in on some terrible impl because we don’t want to break backwards compatibility. The select -> action model is superior.

Having an opinionated editor just makes so much sense. We don’t need 10 different picker implementations.

For sufficiently complex manipulations, I find the "selection-action" ("motion-action") to be more intuitive than "action-motion". Even with vim, I'd often like making use of visual mode.

I think the main limitation to this that I believe is it's probably a bit slower for quick + frequent edits compared to vim.

You do start to think “can I get helix keybindings in my shell”, though.

Would love to see some AI related plug-ins when the plug-in system is finally released.

My vim muscle memory is too strong and stubborn.

"Move to end of the scope" or "insert after this expression" and similar.

The overlap between languages should be large enough to make this feasible.

  > Post-modern?!

  It's a joke. If Neovim is the modern Vim, then Helix is post-modern.

  > Is it any good?

  Yes.

I hate selecting lines up. Down xxx is fine. But to go up I have to do x alt; v k. This would be shift+v k in vim.

I often use } { to navigate the file in vim. In hx it's ] p which is very awkward for the fingers. The auto selection makes it hard to read once I use ] p.

Pasting does not behave like vim, often have to click o first then p.

I have to often press ; to unselect just to be able to insert after I navigate to a character with F f t T.

Can't copy from documentation. Can't create files in the explorer.

It feels like much more work to use hx keybindings than vim.

What I love:

Hints whenever you press a key allow you to learn keybinds quickly.

Very quick.

Built in search, file picker, lsp rust out of the box.

Come on, jump out of your comfort bubble.