archseer · HackerTrans

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/12527

2 years agodiscuss

Author here. I listen to feedback, but it's hard to incorporate every possible requested feature without the codebase becoming an unmaintainable mess.

We're a small team with limited time and I've always emphasized that helix is just one version of a tool and it's perfectly fine if there's a better alternative for some users. Someone with a fully customized neovim setup is probably going to have a better time just using their existing setup rather than getting helix to work the same way.

Code editors in particular are very subjective and helix started as a project to solve my workflow. But users don't always respond well to having feature requests rejected because they don't align with our goals. Plugins should eventually help fit those needs.

archseer

2 years agodiscuss

Yet.

archseer

4 years agodiscuss

That's probably because a lot of electron apps still run via Xwayland and you need to opt into ozone (chromium Wayland implementation)

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

Most of the weight is the generated tree-sitter grammars. I'd like to prune the dependency tree further though.

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

I agree that if you have a setup that works for you, it might not make sense to migrate. I wrote this specifically to move from neovim though, because:

  - I had to maintain a large config just to get basic features like code commenting shortcuts
  - My config would often break, this week all my LSPs died after a neovim update
  - Vim wasn't designed to support multiple cursors

Secondly, I've tried adding a snippet mode in lua:

  - Neovim would lose any marks on lines that got modified. This got better with nvim_buf_set_text (instead of _set_lines), but it'll still lose marks inside the content area.
  - Vim is based around macros, so any sort of scripting requires you to inject an incantation of keys. Try programmatically setting a selection? No such luck.

Rather than dealing with the bugs I decided to work on my own thing because I can iterate on it faster than dealing with C / C's vimscript interface.

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

Sure, I have two QMK keyboards right here: https://github.com/archseer/keys

I consider key remapping orthogonal though, as TeddyDD has stated, there's more to modal editors than just convenient shortcuts.

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

It's not as full featured as coc yet, but I've been adding things as I run into them, so far:

- completion - documentation help/hover - formatting - diagnostics - go to (definition, reference, etc)

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

Yeah, the search implementation right now is kind of thrown in there just to get out of the way of my editing.

There's a way to search through rope chunks by using the low level regex-automata: https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/issues/425#issuecomment-7...

Alacritty currently does that to search over it's cells, I'd like to look into it.

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

The landing page is just something I threw together in an hour so it a bit joke-y and doesn't convey everything -- I'd like to implement some form of scripting (either via wasm, gamelisp or lua) down the road, definitely. I was waiting a bit to see if Grain or Assemblyscript would mature a bit more, but I'm also at the stage where I'm still adding core features so there wasn't any time to focus on scripting yet.

I posted this on r/rust to get some feedback, definitely wasn't prepared to expose it to HN yet.

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

It's similar, but it's closer to kakoune or vis in that you get to visually select first, then edit everything at once.

You can do the same things in vim, but there's no visual feedback: you have to undo and change your query. (Or do cgn, then . . . )

Here's a good example from vis: https://asciinema.org/a/41361

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

I love all of these, maybe I can include it as some sort of easter egg.

archseer

5 years agodiscuss

It's a personal project, I'm allowed to have some fun with the tagline. For what it's worth, I did not post this on HN, and the original title I used on r/rust was "A kakoune/neovim inspired text editor written in Rust".

And no, it's not a neovim frontend.

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