The Helix Text Editor

Summary

ContentsContentsI’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things. I use Rust, despite never having had a professional reason to use it in my life. I switched to Linux in my student years and I’ve never looked back since, even though it constantly breaks and I can’t get my Bluetooth headphones to connect. I have a split keyboard with home row mods set up because I read some random blog posts and it looked cool to me. I literally learned to program because I figured I should learn how to do more nerd stuff.For text editors, though, I’ve mostly stuck with the rather casual choices of VS Code and IntelliJ (when someone’s given me the money for it). They work fine, and I know I should be happy with that, but in the back of my mind I still long for a more hipster alternative. It’s not worked out yet though, so let’s try Helix out and see whether that fits the bill.In this blog post, I’ll go over my motivation for switching to Helix (beyond nerd street cred), how that panned out, what the downsides were, and why I’ve stuck with it and will probably be using Helix as my main text editor for the foreseeable future.Helix is a modal terminal editor with a focus on good defaults and a selection-first action model. There are a few things to unpack there:Modal editing is where you interact with the code in multiple modes — typically, pressing a key in one mode will allow you to manipulate the contents of the document (manipulating selections, duplicating text, moving text around, etc), whereas pressing the same key in a different mode will simply type the character. This adds some complexity (you now need to juggle different modes of editing), but also makes it easier to use powerful text manipulation commands in a consistent way.A terminal editor is one where all of the UI elements get rendered as characters in a terminal window. In many ways, it’s the same as a normal GUI, just instead of drawing arbitrary pixels, you’re instead drawing characters. This is typic...