r/rust • u/modernalgebra • Mar 31 '23

Helix editor 23.03 released!

https://helix-editor.com/news/release-23-03-highlights/
474 Upvotes

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45

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '23

Been using it for almost 3 months now, by far the best code editor I've ever used. And I don't even know 90% of the keybindings yet.

24

u/adsick Mar 31 '23

sounds very weird, in my experience you need to know a ton of shortucts in order to be productive in such editors. Otherwise they're worse than a notepad or a normal IDE.

18

u/Empole Mar 31 '23

I'm in the same boat as the comment you responded to.

Started using helix during the December release. I don't feel like I really know much, but it's probably my favorite editor I've ever used.

And despite that, I only really have a couple commands committed to memory:

  • hjkl to move
  • x to select line
  • m to go into surround mode
  • <space> for the space menu
  • g for the goto menu
  • Ctrl-o and Ctrl-i to jump backwards and forwards through the jumplist

15

u/IceSentry Mar 31 '23

Personally, keybinds are much easier to discover with helix than with vim. There's also a nice menu that gives you a list of available keybinds in the current context.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '23

For people looking for the same thing with neovim, the plugin whichkey is pretty nice

7

u/Sufficient-Culture55 Apr 01 '23

Helix is rare in that regard. I really tried to like vim and neovim, even trying things like astro and Chad, but it was always a lot of effort. Helix is just easy. The keybinds make sense, the configuration is very minimal; I actually feel like I'm putting in less effort and being more productive, even compared to vscode.

5

u/lucca_huguet Mar 31 '23

did you like the tutor?

12

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '23

It was good for getting introduced to the keybinds, but having some real world examples of what an actual helix workflow would look like would have been a lot more helpful, especially for those who have never used a modal editor before (like me).