This makes me want to use Helix, because while I love the idea of a terminal editor, I'm not the kind of person to whittle away a day screwing around with my config files.
It's the main reason I switched from Neovim. I didn't want to maintain a thousand lines of Lua of stuff to have a good baseline editor. I only wanted to maintain my configuration idiosyncracies on top of an editor with good defaults. I think there are Neovim distributions that accomplish mostly the same thing, but then I fell in love with Helix's Kakoune-inspired differences.
Helix has been stalled for a few months, and there are issues that make it frustrating to use at times. For example, :Ex and friends have been relegated to the plugin system (the root cause of the stall, it hasn't been merged). I still prefer it to the config overhead of nvim (as well as the kakoune-style movements!), but the paper cuts have hit a threshold and I've started writing my own text editor (I'd probably use Zed, were it not for lack of kakoune movement support): https://youtu.be/Nzaba0bCMdo?si=00k0D6ZfOUF8OLME
Stalled how? There was a release a couple of months ago. There's another on the way. There are regular changes merged in. There's been foundational changes (events) made to enable new features. The plugins are being worked on, and whilst the speed may not be for you, that doesn't mean its stalled?
The Helix community is the worst part about Helix. Especially the not so benevolent dictator of the project. Way too many comments like “if you don’t like how it’s done go use a different editor” instead of listening to feedback. That’s fine if they don’t care about adoption (they publicly say they don’t), but an actively hostile community doesn’t give me confidence in the editor, despite it being quite nice.
Author here. I listen to feedback, but it's hard to incorporate every possible requested feature without the codebase becoming an unmaintainable mess.
We're a small team with limited time and I've always emphasized that helix is just one version of a tool and it's perfectly fine if there's a better alternative for some users. Someone with a fully customized neovim setup is probably going to have a better time just using their existing setup rather than getting helix to work the same way.
Code editors in particular are very subjective and helix started as a project to solve my workflow. But users don't always respond well to having feature requests rejected because they don't align with our goals. Plugins should eventually help fit those needs.
I like this response. Kudos to sticking to your vision; it's easy to be swayed by users into building a kitchen-sink-fridge-toilet. If you build for everyone, you build for no one.
The community is welcoming, and will help solve issues. However, it’s true (and good IMHO) that the project seems to have a strong idea of what is and is not a core feature. They prioritise building what you might call the Helix editing model and the Helix vision for what an editor should be.
Importantly, Helix isn’t (or doesn’t appear to be) trying to become something approaching an OS, or to be a faster, easier to configure way to get an editor that works like [your preferred configuration of] vim or emacs with lower input latency.
I applaud these things! I like the Helix model more than the vim or emacs models, and the project’s priorities for what should and shouldn’t be in an editor core are pretty well aligned with my own. I do not find I’m desperate for plugins to fix some major deficiency, though I’m sure I’ll use a few once they become available.
This is all what I want to see and fits my definition of a good “benevolent dictator”, maintaining focus and taking tough decisions.
I do maintain a reasonable set of extra keybindings and small configuration changes, as well as a very slightly modified theme [0], but I don’t think many of them are essential and I try pretty hard not to conflict with Helix defaults or radically diverge from the Helix editing model.
It works for me right now, and keeps getting better (rather quickly if you install from git as I do). I’m excited for the future, especially seeing some of the features and improvements moving through PRs.
I've found attitudes like this to be the worst parts of the community.
Maybe it's quite nice because of how they've approached building it? I've been actively watching Helix for quite a while now, and I've observed as hostile those who approach the project are.
From what I've seen, they do listen to feedback. Perhaps similar to the person who said it had stalled, people take not saying yes as not listening to feedback?
Yeah, I think people turning up with an attitude of entitlement or a presumption that something should be a priority for the project summons at least resistance, if not hostility. I’ve never seen anything from the project that I’d call hostile, if anything, I’ve seen patience.
For that reason, I’m glad adoption is a non-goal [0] as it allows for the explicit exclusion of popular demand and copying other “successful” projects as criteria for decision making.
[0] I wish many more projects and companies would follow suit! Something well crafted to be loved by a small, committed, and sophisticated user base/audience is, almost without fail, so much more valuable and special than something designed for mass appeal (or evolves towards it once someone smells a juicy exit). Sadly, that’s not often where the incentives lie.
