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

title, date, draft, references

title	date	draft	references
A Month With Helix	2023-08-03T16:19:15-04:00	false	title url date file My thoughts on Helix after 6 months - Tim Hårek https://timharek.no/blog/my-thoughts-on-helix-after-6-months/ 2023-07-02T12:53:51Z timharek-no-ah7ilz.txt

As mentioned in last month's dispatch, inspired by a post from Tim Hårek, I've been using Helix exclusively for the last month. I'm using it right now to write this! It rips!

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)

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.