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Hey, that's me! I wrote this about a year ago, and I'm still using Helix, and still quite happy with it. The lack of a plugin ecosystem is sometimes irritating, but work there is slowly progressing. And I'm still not a fan of the idea of building the perfect IDE by composing different TUIs together and spending hours trying to get a perfect setup. But other than that, editing in Helix feels so fluent and fast that I'd really struggle not to use it if I went back.

How strange that the article never links directly to the Helix editor. I usually immediately open the homepage of whatever a blog post is talking about as a background tab to be able to click back and forth, or to be able to immediately figure out what the thing being talked about is, but no luck here, except for some decoys (like the "helix" link next to the title which is just the tag "helix" which sends you to a page with all the posts tagged with "helix", which happens to just be this one post).

I of course quickly just googled it myself and found the page, and so afterward I went to the source of the blog post and searched for the URL to confirm that it wasn't actually linked to anywhere. Turns out that about three quarters of the way down, in the "Key Bindings" section, there is a link to the Helix keymappings documentation page, which appears to be the closest thing to a direct homepage link.

Anyways, no nefarious intent being implied of course, I just found it sort of interesting. I am pretty certain it just got accidentally left out, or maybe the project didn't have a homepage back in December of 2024 when this was originally written? Although the github page isn't directly linked either (only one specific issue in the github tracker).

Oh, and here's a link to their page: https://helix-editor.com/

And github page: https://github.com/helix-editor/

Long-time (Neo)Vim user, tried Helix for a few months but just couldn’t get on with it.

It felt too inflexible (not just from lack of plugins), and there were numerous annoyances like save always changing file ownership to the current user, the buffer not reloading when a file is changed externally, no way to highlight (only) trailing spaces, dot repeat doesn’t always work (because the motion/selection comes first) etc.

But mostly I much prefer the way Vim does selection and motions and actions etc.

I wanted to provide an anecdote because I hold the opposite opinions of the author in a variety of ways, but still have used Helix as my primary editor for years now.

I don't chase shiny new tools nor do I aspire to replace my toolchain with things just because they're built in Rust. I've used vim/neovim ~15 years. I don't use many TUIs (I actually can't think of any others besides my editor), but my development workflow is entirely terminal-based. I use native splits/tabs in my terminal emulator instead of screen/tmux/zellij. I spent years balancing having a minimal vim configuration that included plugins (but not compiled ones so that it was portable) but didn't include hundreds or thousands of lines in my vimrc. I'm excited to see how neovim is making progress with native LSP, but for years getting it working meant continuously tweaking vimscript/lua code or adopting a massive plugin written in TypeScript.

When I first tried Helix, LSP just worked; it read what was on the $PATH and used it. That's perfect because it solves for another source of annoyance: having different versions of tools for different projects. As the author notes, there are some LSP features that don't work with Helix, but whenever I dig into the issues, I almost always come to the conclusion that the issue lies in LSP being a VSCode monoculture rather than a deficiency in Helix itself. However, using the right version of a tool for a specific project and not spending any time configuring LSP servers were the top problems plaguing my usage of neovim.

If you're a vim user and you're concerned about muscle memory, by the first week I was proficient and by two weeks, Helix was the default in my brain.

I was a huge supporter of neovim -- I actually was submitting patches to the vim mailing list to fix vim on a beta version of macOS at the time taruda posted his original async patches that kicked everything off. If you had asked me the day before I tried Helix that you could reimplement a vim-like codebase from scratch well enough to abandon the original vim code, I would've agreed with you.

Switched to Helix about a year ago and haven't looked back since. Has almost everything I need in it(with a few exceptions). With Vim I would've had to have installed some janky plugins.

I really recommend it if you find Vim motions unintuitive and want some of the basic features of IDEs like VSCode.

My biggest gripes: - No plugin system (yet). - Configuration documentation is not the best. - Hasn't reached enough popularity to where other apps have "Helix mode" like how a bunch of apps have "vim mode". I find myself wanting to do Helix motions in other apps.

I like Helix. I couldn't get Neovim to stick after a few tries but Helix let me into the modal editor world. Just works, no config required and their editing model is better for newcomers because you can see what you're about to do. I eventually switched to Neovim after a few months though (thanks to Kickstart.nvim), because configuring with a programming language is just so much more powerful.

That said, I'm convinced people praising Helix because they "don't have to install 60 plugins" or "constantly keep tweaking their config" will just start blaming Helix when it gets plugin support and if it gets a dynamic configuration language.

You don't have to install 60 plugins (I have 6) and you don't have to keep tweaking your config (I haven't touched core parts of my config in years, just like to play around with logic sometimes). It's not a feature to not support these things just because you lack the self control to stop playing with your editor and focus on your work.

I tried to use helix as a vim user, but couldn't get used to the key binds. However I recently found evil-helix, and it's a joy. https://github.com/usagi-flow/evil-helix

> This has some advantages — for example it means that Helix is very responsive and lightweight, because there’s not a lot of heavy rendering work to be doing.

Which text editor is unresponsive because of heavy rendering?? And that's the only potential benefit the author has identified

Too bad the development of helix is pretty slow and core devs are pretty resistant to various of changes.

It would be benefit a lot from some funding, but it's hard to find funding for a TUI editor.

It insane how fast Zed is moving in terms of development, on the other hand, I'm still waiting for some features in helix for more than 2 years. Helix devs have their own vision and reject a lot of attempts/PRs to make it better.

Regarding slow development, I saw a thread on reddit today https://old.reddit.com/r/HelixEditor/s/zn0xiSs9pp

Helix is great! All of the features I wish vim had out of the box, and fast.

It would be cool if it got more token-based movement/selection/replacement features, since it already has good tree-sitter integration.

Was looking into Helix after recently starting to feel the urge to switch things up a little from vscode and not entirely enjoying trying to use neovim as almost an IDE. I remember enough keybinds to do basic editing, but not enough to smoothly flow between other modes/buffers without having to consult documentation. Didn't quite feel like Helix was what I was looking for either, in part due to the apparent lack of Copilot support(?) and lack of plugin support in general.

I'm finding that spacemacs seems a bit easier to use, striking a nice balance between vim style editing and emacs style everything else, making it easy to slowly build up memory instead of overwhelming me with keybinds and configuration details.

A lot of the time I find myself highlighting things in NeoVim before I delete/copy them. Probably from years of interacting with text in GUI applications, it just feels more natural. I've heard about Helix's approach before and it seems like it would fit well for me, but I can never bring myself to switch. Probably a little sunk cost fallacy because of how much I put into learning NeoVim, and a little about being able to customize it. I don't do a lot, but I like what I've done, and more importantly I like that I have the options.

I love the batteries-included nature of Helix. Especially for people with no prior experience with modal editors, it has a much nicer learning curve compared to vim.

I now just use micro and be done with everything else.

There are still things in (neo)vim that I miss, even a year or so later (particularly persistent undo files), but helix's startup time is so much faster (and LSP integration so good), I hardly use anything else.

I am a long-time vim user and tried out helix. In many ways it's great but the fact that there was (at that time) no "reflow text" function made it just completely unusable for me for basic text-editing outside of code.

If that's been added I'd take another look.

Happy Helix Editor user here! My favourite text editor