Skip to main content
My CLion license expires in a week, and i won't be renewing it. This means it's time to switch to a new editor. I've been looking at #helix - written in #rust, nice modal interface, seems to want to do things "The Right Way(TM)".

Anyone care to share their experience?
#rust #helix
silwol
silwol  
•
I've been using #helix for several weeks now, migrated from #nvim and I'm not looking back. All the things I need and which are tedious to configure and maintain in nvim work just out of the box. You will still be missing some functionality that you know from CLion though, as far as I can judge from the outside. Proper rust-analyzer and (for me) clippy installation is a must though. Read and try the space popup functionality, it will help you a lot. Only https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1125 bugs me.

automatic reload when file changes externally · Issue #1125 · helix-editor/helix

It would be great if it were detected when the file you are editing has been changed externally, and if possible, automatically reload the file. I imagine it could work similarly to vim and kakoune...
GitHub
#helix #nvim
silwol
silwol  
•
Also if you're familiar with (n)vim, your muscle memory will have a hard time for a few days, there are lots of shared keystrokes, but also a few crucial ones that differ.
Chris Gioran
Chris Gioran  
•
@silwol Excellent feedback, thank you. 🙂

I am not used to vim, this will be my first serious use of a modal editor. I set it up just to see it, it seems to cover the basic things i want from clion. What i mostly care about is easy navigation to library sources. If it can also work with the kernel source tree, that's a huge bonus.

Helix it is.
@silwol
silwol
silwol  
•
Easy navigation to library sources depends on language and proper language server setup (helix --health is amazing for that), for rust-analyzer this works smoothly. Even though I never tried, I expect it to be able to properly navigate through large code bases like the kernel source tree as well, the underlying technology for that is ripgrep, which delivers amazing performance.
Chris Gioran
Chris Gioran  
•
@silwol Indeed, when i played around with it i could look at the rust library sources just fine. I remember it took a while to get helix --health to come back green, but after some fiddling, it worked.

Haven't tried with the linux sources yet. I am curious to see how it handles the rust kernel tree.
@silwol
⇧