Start dispatch 6 + Helix

content/journal/a-month-with-helix/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+---
+title: "A Month With Helix"
+date: 2023-08-03T16:19:15-04:00
+draft: false
+references:
+- title: "My thoughts on Helix after 6 months - Tim Hårek"
+  url: https://timharek.no/blog/my-thoughts-on-helix-after-6-months/
+  date: 2023-07-02T12:53:51Z
+  file: timharek-no-ah7ilz.txt
+---
+
+As mentioned in [last month's dispatch][1], inspired by [a post from Tim Hårek][2], I've been using [Helix][3] exclusively for the last month. I'm using it right now to write this! It rips!
+
+<!--more-->
+
+What I like:
+
+* It's easy to get started
+  * If you know Vim, you're like 75% of the way to Helix fluency
+  * It has a nice tutorial
+  * The "minor modes" feature little pop-up cheat sheets that make learning the various keyboard combos easy
+* Stuff just makes sense, whereas some Vim stuff always struck me as arcane
+  * e.g. `y` to yank; `space + y` to yank to the system clipboard
+  * or `:theme` followed by a space displays a giant list of all available themes (`gruvbox` natch)
+* Built-in language server support
+  * `hx --health` makes it pretty clear how to get your language servers set up
+* The multi-cursor stuff is nice once you get the hang of it
+* It is simultaneously quite polished + under active development; several times I went looking for how to do something and found an active GitHub PR where the feature is being developed
+
+What I don't like:
+
+* It is very sensitive about external file changes; I switch git branches a lot, and if I'm working in one branch, then check out a different branch, and then switch back to the original branch, my next save is often rejected unless I remember to `w!`, which I often don't
+* Can't presently run multiple language servers for the same language
+  * I'd really like to run both `standardrb` and `solargraph` when I'm working in Ruby
+  * You can run a separate language server and formatter, which works fine, but there's a visible delay on save before the formatter kicks in, and you don't get nice in-editor warnings about style violations
+  * Though this is coming soon, I think
+* Missing a couple key features from Vim plugins I'm quite fond of:
+  * `fugitive.vim`'s `:Git blame` view
+  * `NERDTree` file system explorer -- the built-in fuzzy finder is awesome as long as you know the name of the file you're looking for, which I occasionally don't
+* I had to reconfigure how the option key works in iTerm and have lost my ability to type accented characters inside the terminal, which I've needed to do, I think, twice ([More info][4])
+
+Pull it down with Homebrew or similar, and give it a shot. Hint: you launch Helix with `hx` -- figuring that out might've been the hardest part of my Helix journey so far.
+
+[1]: /journal/dispatch-5-july-2023/
+[2]: https://timharek.no/blog/my-thoughts-on-helix-after-6-months/
+[3]: https://helix-editor.com/
+[4]: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2469