helix VS kakoune

Nice post. Obligatory Helix plug: For anyone interested in taking this further, there are whole editors designed around multi-cursor editing.

https://helix-editor.com/

I could never turn it off completely but I do sometimes use the Acme theme during the day (it's too bright in the evening), which highlights just comments, strings, and errors.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Themes#acme

You can use a snippet LSP to work around Helix not having a built-in LSP manager. They're listed in https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/395

I'm probably not the average python programmer.

But I normally just create two terminals (I have a tiling window manager) and in one I open a python file under /tmp/ write my code and execute it in the other terminal.

I would probably use a REPL if it was integrated in my favorite editor ( https://helix-editor.com ).

Wow, that's been there a while: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/commit/35c974c9c49f912...

Wonder how I missed that. I'm getting a re-education in helix today -- thank you! I'll go through `hx --tutor` again before I insert any more feet in my mouth.

Interesting to see how they are gonna approach integrating plugins/extensions system, because this is likely gonna be one of the major factors affecting adoption and ecosystem growth.

Helix devs, for instance, lean towards a Scheme-like implementation. [1]

[1]: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/3806#discu...

Helix's modal editing is based on Kakoune's modal editing which is like an evolution to Vim's modal editing. You can think of it as being always in selection (visual) mode. https://github.com/mawww/kakoune?tab=readme-ov-file#selectio...

And while it doesn’t use the sam language precisely, I think in the broader “postfix Vi with visual feedback” category Kakoune[1] also warrants mentioning. The command language, in my experience, feels much more logical than that of Vis coming from a blank slate (things might be different if you come from Vim, but even when I used Vim regularly I never used the editing language that much exactly because I could never remember the damn thing).

And having mentioned Kakoune it’d probably be unfair to then not mention Helix[2]. It has a very similar editing language, but it’s a fairly anti-Unix everything-bolted-in affair on the inside (“everything works out of the box” being the advertising take) compared to Kakoune’s Acme-inspired no-scripting scripting (there’s an ex-style command to exec a user program that can then drive the editor over stdio RPC, a set of hooks, and that’s it). So if you’ve come for the Plan 9 feels, I don’t expect Helix to be that appealing. It’s still a good editor, nevertheless.

[1] https://kakoune.org/

[2] https://helix-editor.com/

You can take a look at kakoune. The source code (excluding documentations, test cases, customizations etc.) is less than 40k. It is, IMHO, a show case of a C++ project in use.

> I wonder if the author has ever heard of vis[0]

Yes.

https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Kakoun...

https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki#onboarding

> which imho fulfills far better each one of those premises

Not very motivated for such a harsh critic..

I've been using Vim for years, but if there was one thing I could change, it would be the verb-noun order. The Kakoune[1] editor behaves mostly like Vim, but where Vim has `dw` as "delete word", Kakoune has it backwards: `wd`.

It might sound minor, but by placing the range first, Kakoune can give a preview of what will be changed. The longer or more complicated the command, the more this feature shines.

Strictly better as far as I know. A shame my muscle memory, and all default installations, are still stuck with Vim.

[1] https://kakoune.org/

Helix is a postmodern text editor built in Rust built for the terminal. It is inspired by Kakoune, another Rust based text editor. Helix has got multiple selections, built-in Tree-sitter integration, powerful code manipulation and Language server support.