---
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!

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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