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Coders or lemmy, what editors do you use? Is it worth learning a new one? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When I was in high school I found Sublime Text and learned "multiple cursors". Since then, I've transitioned to vscode, mainly because I need LSP (without too much configuration work) for my work.

I keep hearing about how modal editing is faster and I would like to switch to a more performant editor. I've been looking at helix, as the 4th generation of the vi line of editors. Is anyone using it? Is it any good for the main code editor?

The problem that I have is that learning new editing keybindings would probably take me a month of time, before I get to the same amount of productivity (if I ever get here at all). So I'm looking for advice of people who have already done that before.

My code editing does involve a lot of "ctrl-arrow" to move around words, "ctrl-shift-arrow" to select words, "home/end" to move to beginning/end of the line, "ctrl-d" for "new cursor at next occurrence", "shift-alt-down" for "new cursor in the line below", "ctrl-shift-f" for "format file" and a few more to move around using LSP-provided "declaration"/"usages".

I would have to unlearn all of that.

Also, I do use "ctrl-arrow" to edit this post. Have you changed keybindings in firefox too?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Helix is absolutely wonderful.

Used to use Vim/Neovim, but the hassle of setting it up and maintaining huge configuration files was a pain (for me).

Also I never really got it working the way I wanted and never had LSP working for all the languages I needed.

Helix on the other hand. My config file is under 20 lines, LSP works super for all my needs. Well thought out keybindings (mostly) and overall a joy to use.

Nice features and fast.

Still a bunch of things missing, it is a rather young piece of software, but I have been using it as my only editor for the last 1 1/2 years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah, keybindings are well thought out. The most off-putting thing of default vim is that there are about 5 different "delete" commands. One for a character, one for the whole line, one for selected text, one for end of line. In helix, this is all just "delete selected text" and then "x" is for selecting a line. Make so much more sense.