Notes on Switching to Helix from Vim

Summary

Hello! Earlier this summer I was talking to a friend about how much I love using fish, and how I love that I don’t have to configure it. They said that they feel the same way about the helix text editor, and so I decided to give it a try. I’ve been using it for 3 months now and here are a few notes. I think what motivated me to try Helix is that I’ve been trying to get a working language server setup (so I can do things like “go to definition”) and getting a setup that feels good in Vim or Neovim just felt like too much work. After using Vim/Neovim for 20 years, I’ve tried both “build my own custom configuration from scratch” and “use someone else’s pre-buld configuration system” and even though I love Vim I was excited about having things just work without having to work on my configuration at all. Helix comes with built in language server support, and it feels nice to be able to do things like “rename this symbol” in any language. One of my favourite things about Helix is the search! If I’m searching all the files in my repository for a string, it lets me scroll through the potential matching files and see the full context of the match, like this: For comparison, here’s what the vim ripgrep plugin I’ve been using looks like: There’s no context for what else is around that line. One thing I like about Helix is that when I press g, I get a little help popup telling me places I can go. I really appreciate this because I don’t often use the “go to definition” or “go to reference” feature and I often forget the keyboard shortcut. Helix doesn’t have marks like ma, 'a, instead I’ve been using Ctrl+O and Ctrl+I to go back (or forward) to the last cursor locarion I think Helix does have macros, but I’ve been using multiple cursors in every case that I would have previously used a macro. I like multiple cursors a lot more than writing macros all the time. If I want to batch change something in the document, my workflow is to press % (to highlight everything), then s to sele...