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.

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 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.

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.

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/

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

> 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

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

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.

Happy Helix Editor user here! My favourite text editor