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Trying out Helix (editor)

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Two years ago I discovered a course at MIT called The Missing Semester of Your CS Education. I learned a lot, a lot of stuff that I thought I was going to learn during my degree. And when it came to their explaination and approach to Vim, I was hooked! I started using Vim everyday, learning to add plugins, looking at other peoples configs and so on. I eventually ended up switching to Neovim last year and rewrote my config in Lua and I was happy. I was happy until I actually tried out Helix.

I had heard of Helix on Hacker News a few months back, but I didn't think much of it until I watched this video from the NeovimConf about it. It has all (I think) of the plugins I use everyday just built in, the keymaps are different, backwards even. But the whole editor feels so much more fast, it might be placebo or it may be the fact that it doesn't rely on supporting legacy stuff. Don't get me wrong, Vim/Neovim is great.

So this last few days I've been trying out Helix, there are a lot of things that I need to re-learn, like how to delete lines, surrounding words, selecting inbetween different characters etc. And that every action I do in normal mode is basically selecting/highlighting.

It's been fun, I'm really taken aback by some of the keymaps, like undo/redo which is u/U respectively. In Vim that would be u/<C-r> which also works, but may seem backwords because a lot of the backwardness in modal-editors seems to be lowercase and then uppercase. I dunno, I like it!

I spent time refactoring my scripts for my log-handling on my blog, and I used Helix to get more comfortable with it. Since I mostly use Deno I quickly realized that the TypeScript LSP is not good enough for Deno. However, getting TypeScript to work with Deno's LSP was fairly straight forward. I switched out JavaScript and TypeScripts LSP in the langauges.toml-config with Deno's, and voila - it just worked!

I'm going to try to use Helix a bit more going forward, I really like the speed and that I can easily understand my own config. I might keep posting about Helix as my journey continues!