I'd honestly point folks towards Helix[0] these days if they don't already have something keeping them on neovim/vim.
There's very little in the ways of needing to configure Helix; it has built-in most functionality that you'd find with batteries-included vim "distributions" and it works out of the box with the installed LSP servers on your system.
Helix itself looks amazing, but the keybindings make me stay away from it. Even if they are better than the original, I don't want to learn another set of "non-standard" keybindings that I need to switch between only to use an editor.
It's the opposite for me, the keybindings are the best feature IMO. It's like all the niggling little things that didn't make sense back when learning the Vim keybindings, have all been removed and replaced with things that make more of a coherent whole.
I can't use it yet because of the lack of addons/an ecosystem, but I hope to one day either move to helix or bring as much of this sensible keybindings system over to neovim as possible.
I've been using helix the last week or so. I can confirm everything "just works". My config file is not a turing-complete nightmare, it's literally 10 lines and took about 15 minutes to set up, most of that being personal preference on UI. Great program.
I've tried vim-as-IDE many times and personally I've found that I just don't have the patience/discipline to get it all set up and not have it become a huge time sink. I end up getting frustrated and start up VS code and what do you know, everything works absolutely perfectly with zero config. So why bother. New programming language? It literally pops up telling me what extension to install and < 5 seconds later it's working.
Installed helix, and nothing 'worked'. LSP wouldn't start, syntax highlighting didn't work, and once I did get them working, editing JSX caused strange issues where the autopair functionality created a duplicate of my code several lines above where I was working..
Not particularly impressed tbh.
It was very fast to start and use the fuzzy search though.
Personally I have one hell of a config, but since you’re fine with vscode defaults, the only thing I’ve really done to vim that counts was cloning ale into a specific vimfiles directory. What was your package set?
The selling point is that it's a solid editor with zero config I can use in the terminal for those "in between" tasks where it's not really worth pulling it up in an IDE but worth having some syntax highlighting and LSP support. Think like, I need to make a quick change to a python script in some far flung directory. In/out in less than a minute.
Just the fact that you're asking what my package set was is a turnoff for me. There shouldn't be a package set. It should just work. In VS Code when I need the editor to have additional features I just click the button, pick the extension with the highest number of installs, and 99% of the time it immediately does what I want. In vim you play this whole game where you google for it, gather opinions on the "best" plugin for that task, read the README, "just simply add these lines to your lua config", figure out why the keybind is conflicting with your existing keybind setup, etc etc. Goodbye afternoon!
I've tried lunarvim, astrovim, etc etc. Those work great! Until you actually do want to change something. Now you're back in config hell, and even worse, because you didn't even design this hell yourself, it's someone else's hell.
I agree with you, it would be nice to have a cloud profile, a plugin store, few other “windowing” features.
But by package set I literally mean it, e.g. mine is ale, nerdtree, snipmate, and the rest is cosmetic: scss syntax, tab guides and a couple of other syntaxes. Not some lunar/astro nvim-based heap of packages.
What I really miss in vscode and others, be it zeroconf or not, is editor programming features. E.g. I like to have sections in code that I can easily navigate. Something nmap ; /\/\/<Space>sec_<CR>$ does that. I also can create a popup with all of them + function names grepped from an unsaved source and navigate. Or highlight few more tokens. That is impossible in vscode unless you take a deep dive into its or its modules not very well documented internals. You can’t even write a module in .vscoderc, it must be formed into a package and [re]installed or get run in a special vscode mode. If the store doesn’t have what I want, I’m out of luck.
Things that failed (various degrees) for me: correct linewise indentation, readable sections on outline or minimap, non-syntactic folds, custom command mappings. Also the defaults are horrible, my last attempt was something like three pages of settings.json. Way too many afternoons, deleted my whole account to never try again. Tbf, my vimrc is also two pages long in the part that is related to settings. But at least the rest does what I want.
Correct. If you've got no background in vim, it might be a good thing Helix has broken "backwards compatibility" in order to have more cohesive key-bindings.
I think folks might be over-estimating the difference between the Helix and vim. IME, adding "ge" to Vimium[0] was good enough to avoid any conflicting muscle-memory. I think many folks configuring their vimrc are deviating equally as far or farther than the Helix defaults.
I'm not sure that I buy the purity argument -- almost all "vim modes" in other software are interpretations of the vim key-bindings and not an embeded vim/neovim engine. As a result, they all have their own caveats and folks using vim get used to functionality that exists exclusively in their vimrc. Often times vim mode just means supporting "hjkl".
Yes my problem with helix is when the keystrokes that are muscle memory in Vim don't have any actions in helix this makes it problematic to move to helix
over moving to neovim for example neovim retains most if not all the vi keystrokes not just out of respect to the vi authors
Setup how? I've used vi/vim daily as my main editor for the past 35 years or so, over that time I doubt I've put more than 20 total hours into its setup. I've been using some evolution of the same .vimrc for decades and it's only accumulated a couple dozen lines. The longest setup task I can remember was a few years ago getting MacVim to launch with one window per folder (with files as tabs, in most cases that equates to one window per repo, handy when I'm working across a couple different ones), but that was all shell work, not within vim itself.
Personally for me the setup only gets annoying when you want IDE-like features: text completion, treesitter syntax highlighting, go to definitions, ...
It's a tiny amount--I'm guessing I've probably easily logged 20,000 hours of active use in vi by this point, I can't think of any other tool I use regularly that has a better time-of-use/time-of-setup ratio. Compared to the time I've spent, say, installing Ruby gems and fixing dependency conflicts it's a rounding error, and Ruby's only been a focus for a small fraction of my career. To clarify that wasn't ever one 20 hour chunk, that's a rough guess at the total time spent setting it up on dozens of different computers across many different operating systems and window managers. It's typically well under an hour of setup per computer, and much of that time goes towards remembering where to find installers, picking fonts, etc.
I used to have crazy IDE-like setups but have realized that Vim is great for straight text manipulation (writing bash scripts, log parsing, etc) and VS code or eclipse is great for heavy duty programming. Now my vimrc is less than 50 lines and no plugins.
