Helix 25.01 Highlights
helix-editor.comI'm excited for macro keybinds! They should be a nice stopgap for some features until a plugin system is finished.
Yeah you can really do a lot with them if you get creative.
I'm primarily using Neovim for most of my editing but am keeping a close eye on Helix as there's a lot to love about it.
I want to like Helix. Its sane defaults are good. Selection model is even better and superior to everything else.
But its lack of proper API and total lack of server-client model makes it just completely unusable. I've seen people trying to integrate it with their file browsers, file trees, terminal multiplexers or window managers but there is just no normal way to get data into a running Helix instance other than sending keypresses and absolutely no way to get data out of it except of reading its screen. Its basic premise is just absolutely horrible which is of course completely subjective.
Another dealbreakers for me are absence of a proper debug support, code outlines, memory views, variable watchers, registers views etc. for working with embedded (as in running on microcontrollers) Rust.
What do you use instead?
Just curious.
I've been using Helix for some months now but haven't touched Rust. For that I plan to go temporarily back to vscodium + rust-analyzer + probe-rs which I know is a crazy good combination (no stinky openocd configurations, no gdb and connecting it to one of gazillion debug plugins - probe-rs has its own DAP thingy).
In meanwhile I'll look into neovim and making its selection model more like in Helix. For me it's not about motion before verb... I can use visual mode etc.. but about having consistent advanced commands for refining multicursor selections like selecting in selection, searching in selection, spliting selection to even more cursors or collapsing touching selections into one etc.