toggleterm.nvim VS helix

akinsho/toggleterm.nvim: A neovim lua plugin to help easily manage multiple terminal windows.

As a data point, I'd like to chime in here. I have been a 15 year user of tmux (and screen before that) and never thought I'd change my development habits. Over the holidays I decided I would do one of those once-every-five-years upgrades to my vim setup as I had accrued dozens of vendored plugins in normal vim and wanted to see what the big deal with neovim was.

I bit the bullet and evaluated some of the "distributions" (AstroNvim and kickstarter) and played around with all the new lua plugins that I had never thought I needed (why use telescope when FZF-vim worked so well?).

Anyways, after a month of tweaking and absorbing, I found myself running Neovide only, and doing something I never thought I'd see, running tmux from within neovim/neovide. I think this only works (for me) because of session management (there are half a dozen plugins for handling quickly changing 'workspaces') and because the built-in terminal (with a very useful plugin called toggleterm: https://github.com/akinsho/toggleterm.nvim) works so well.

I have not stopped using tmux and layouts, and it sits in another fullscreen iterm2 workspace, but I find that I now spend 90% of my time using a fullscreen neovide and summoning/toggling tmux momentarily for running commands.

Of course, the caveat here is that my preferred mode of operation is being fullscreen as often as possible. I think if your preferred mode of operation is to always see splits then running neovim from the terminal within tmux is still the way to go.

As for why I like neovide? I find the animations, when tweaked to be less 'cool' are extremely useful to see where the cursor jumps to. I am also a huge fan of the fact that I can finally use 'linespace' to put some space between my lines of code -- it is an aesthetic I didn't realize I wanted.

For splitting the terminal you could try either toggleterm or tmux. If you want to send things from one tmux pane to another, then you can use slime. For a toggle-able filetree, you can use nvim tree.

I just found toggleterm which feels awesome. Pretty much exactly what I was looking for to use with Alacritty but even better since its integrated into the rest of my Neovim workflow.

I saw this plugin that tells me how to do it, however I got confused after I added "require("toggleterm").setup({})" in the lazy.lua file and installed the package as well using the Lazy command

I tried toggleterm but I wasn't successful.

And I never really got into Gitsigns or vim-fugitive. Lots of people love them, so I'm sure they're great, but I'm happy opening a floating terminal with Toggleterm and using Lazygit.

I agree with u/Bamseg, but you can get what you want using toggleterm.nvim BUT NOT IN FLOAT.

I use gitsigns for linewise operations (blame, reset, etc), and a floating terminal (toggleterm) for everything else. flatten.nvim also helps with nested nvim instances.

but I ended up finding a good enough workaround by using Lazygit through Toggleterm.

I know that there's no such thing as a unique name, but the fact that https://helix-editor.com/ is a living project, first released in May 2021, might mean that using "Helix" for this project, first released in November 2024, isn't the best choice of name. Or at least it might be worth a disclaimer in the readme!

Helix was great until I discovered something that was a dealbreaker for me. They treat newline character as a normal character which is just very very non intuitive. I just wish there was option for behavior same as vim does. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2956

The bikeshedding has long past. They've been working on the implementation now for some time.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675

Lots of vim/emacs mentions so I feel obliged to mention Helix (https://helix-editor.com/). Used neovim for _years_, tried Helix for a few weeks and never looked back

I’m not sure. Command based editing opens more doors than just optimizing keystrokes. There are edits I somewhat regularly do with Vim macros that save me minutes of typing and cognitive burden of examining refactor locations. It’s probably not going to be make or break, but I do think it’s significant in a p > 0.05 sense.

I imagine Vim is only just a local optima too. There are newer editors [0] that are more AST aware that I haven’t been able to fairly evaluate yet (not in the boring corp approved software list).

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

Likely soon: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675#issuecomment...

My initial point was just that it's kind of nice to have something that's usable from the get-go. I don't miss my giant vim config one bit.

If you're using the Helix Editor — the lightning-fast, modal, and fully-native code editor — you probably already appreciate its clean interface and modern features. But let’s be honest: theming matters.

Over the past 5 years, I have worked primarily with Rust, Golang, Python and Typescript. I have built and maintained various services and tools, ranging from internal utilities to services used by millions of users. For most of my career I have worked remotely, collaborating across various timezones. I like to work in environments with good engineering culture.

As a fellow hn reader you might be particularly interested in

- Lox Language Interpreters: https://github.com/nkitsaini/lox

- Contribution to uv: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/pull/11738

- Contribution to Helix Editor: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/9660

- Solutions to protohackers: https://github.com/nkitsaini/protohackers_impl

You can find more details in the resume at https://nkit.dev/resume.pdf

Nearly all my developer tools are open-source projects written in Rust (Nushell, Helix, WezTerm, and more).