Interesting. Have you spent any time with neovim? If so, I’m curious how they compare. I was just starting to investigate the nvim ecosystem, but it’s quite daunting. Still, I like the idea of everything being open source, and using plugins to augment my workflow.
Helix was inspired by neovim. Though mostly the inbuilt LSP/tree sitter support. Its keybindings are a mix between what neovim has and kakoune, though closer to kakoune I think. The major advantage IMO that helix has over neovim is built in support for most things you need plugins for in neovim as well as sane defaults out the box. You don’t need 10s of plugins and 100s of lines of config to get helix to work like a modern editor - it just does out the box. All you need to do is install the LSP server for the languages you are interested in and launch helix.
The major downside ATM is it has no plugin support at all. Which is not as bad as it sounds as it includes so much out the box that you would typically require plugins for in neovim. They are working on plugin support though so it is only a matter of time for this to be fixed. Currently I don’t feel the need for any plugins when using it so IMO it is not a deal breaker for me or my workflow. But the need to manage large configs and sets of plugins had already become too cumbersome in neovim for my liking.
I used vi and then neovim for about 20 years (like the other @pimeys). I switched to kakoune first because nvim’s plugins were a mess and the LSP integration was unreliable. With all the plugins needed to get a decent dev editor, startup was starting to get slow. Kakoune had multi-select. But mainly, I switched because one necessary plugin (I think it was the LSP one) insisted on starting a nodejs server. Plugins were written in whatever, and running nvim meant spawning Ruby, Python, NodeJS, and whatever else processes; I switched because the nvim ecosystem was getting as bloated as EMACS.
I bounced from Kakoune to Helix after a couple of years, because Kakoune relies heavily on chording, and modality (pressing a key to get into a mode to do something or some things) is superficial; Helix makes much greater use of modes, often nested, and feels much more faithful to the vi philosophy to me. Also, Tree-Sitter is a disruptive technology.
Because, while many people are unaware of it or have beard of it but don’t know what it does, it’s a novel, well-executed, reusable solution that is incredible at what it does. Ot’s disruptive in the sense that I believe it’s changing how programs that need to parse code are written, and they’ll become faster to write, faster to execute, and better for it.
Not big-D disruptive, as in changing the face of computer science, but little-D, as in having a quiet but disproportionate impact on a lot of software.
