Beginner-Friendly, Unofficial Documentation for Helix Text Editor

Your cheatsheet has some hallucinations in there. For example there is no :git command

you can do "! git status" etc

There is some other integration for git like SPACE + g to see file changes for example

Heh, "vi=hx" was exactly how I forced myself to spend a week in helix. Just go for it

It's the first editor since probably sublime text that I've genuinely enjoyed. Useful without any configuration, and very easy to get a productive environment.

There's a few rough edges that I'm trying to work through. I've been able to solve my "open in X" like key bindings. But I have yet to get things like "run test for current method". That's probably the biggest pain point I've had so far

Hey nice to have you here. I found your cheatsheet and printed it out a while ago :D

It’s great! How did you do it? I printed it out months ago and wondered how to do one myself

> It's rarely a good idea to do a bunch of work on a big change to an open source project in a direction that has not been validated by the maintainers.

While this is good advice in general, it doesn't tell the whole story in the case of this specific project. The helix maintainers have a track record of giving very slow "no"s and wasting contributor time. They encourage contributors to fix various odds and ends, until the PR has been nit picked to death, and then finally the concept is rejected. Totally backwards, good project leadership would front-load the conceptual yay-or-nay before reviewing any actual code.

The Helix devs have a very specific and unusual taste, so I would never consider PR-ing anything more than a simple bug fix.

Not all open-source projects want contributors, many are open-source for different reasons.

> - The homepage right now is extremely lightweight and uses next to no javascript. The new design just looks like the same generic Starlight template I'm not sure we want to use a javascript framework. While it provides a lot of features, bitrot in the javascript ecosystem happens at a very fast pace (and pulls in thousands of dependencies). I have sites written both in gatsby and vuepress and between major version breaking changes and deprecations as frameworks cycle, it's a ton of work to keep up (e.g. vuepress -> vitepress/vuepress v2). Even mdbook upgrades have been a pain since we need to merge down theme updates. I'd prefer to see something simple, e.g. (https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/). What do we do in five years when Starlight is deprecated by another framework, and Astro is several major releases ahead, with breaking changes?

This is a very valid point, and a mark of a mature developer who has been bitten by frontend churn, and wants something stable, simple, reliable, and predictable.

Writing good docs is almost impossible, the existing ones weren’t good when I read them so I wouldn’t be so reverent about these norms or whatever. State your contribution as loudly as you want but be prepared to meet the light of reality. Also sometimes the people in charge are too stupid to understand you’re right.

You'll need to spend a lot of time figuring it out and yet miss many of the features.

I experimented with Helix a bit, and my experience (which uses a slightly different workflow):

* I need workspace folders. Even combined with fzf or similar tools, file navigation is nowhere as easy as in VSCode

* Debugging is important and missing

* Missing custom extensions that likely will never be ported to Helix even if there is an extension system

The debugger in helix was extremely barebones last I tried, LLM integration can only be made available through custom language servers since they do not support plugins yet.

If you are interested in making a move to a terminal editor I would instead look to neovim until helix matures a bit more

I don't think Helix can currently match the C++ experience you get with VS Code.

* Debugging is rough. There's experimental DAP support, but it isn't ready to be used. I was able to set breakpoints and step through the code, but the UI for exploring variables / state while paused felt missing or was unintuitive enough that I couldn't figure it out. I use CLion for debugging.

* Goto definition works with clangd as long as your CMake setup outputs compile_commands.json, which you already do.

* Renaming symbols (variables / functions) via clangd works fine.

* Intellisense is decent, but I had to tweak clangd settings. By default, it would stop returning results after scanning a certain number of symbols, so some valid functions just didn't show up. I was using Helix for a few days before realizing this problem, it isn't obvious that you are getting an artificially constrained filtered view of your symbols via default clangd. Maybe this is a distro packaging issue though?

* The order of intellisense completions is not great. CLion is smart about surfacing relevant suggestions first. In Helix + clangd, I often get obscure symbols that obviously have nothing to do with my project or context. It's not the worst thing, but it is mildly annoying and noticeable.

* "go to error" doesn't surface errors in files that aren't open. In Helix, space D brings up workspace diagnostics, but it only shows errors for compilation units already open. This appears to be a clangd issue, as space D in other languages will show all project errors. CLion does not suffer from this problem.

* I think you can get LLM suggestions via an LSP, but I've not tried personally. Assuming it's true that you can get LLM suggestions, it's not clear to me that you can run two LSP's on the same file, so it might be a choice between clangd and an LLM LSP? Not sure.

* No integrated build support. You'll probably end up building from a terminal. I use Wezterm with a custom lua script that is invoked on a hotkey. I put a lot of thought into the build UX, and what I've done is both extremely hacky and still not good enough.

Helix is not flexible, it's uncompromising. I like it, but I think it's hard to beat CLion or vscode for C++ development.

I'd say right now, if you have a good setup already, stick with what you have.

> but they can be… stubborn about what gets into the core.

Yes, as an onlooker who is similarly cautious about moving to helix, I consider this to be a major risk factor. I've watched the maintainers waste dozens of hours of contributors' time, and leave the project with no improvement afterwards. I would actively warn against anyone trying to contribute to the project. The maintainers simply don't know how to run an open source project, and it's unlikely you will be able to accomplish anything. It's fine for a project to not accept contributions, and if you don't have the skillset to leverage contributor labor, then it's better to be upfront about it.

That being said, I hope they figure out the plugin system, or someone forks the project to add the missing table stakes features.

I actually moved from VS Code to helix and happily used it exclusively for about 4-5 months, at that point I had list list of things I really wanted in my editor. I took that list to neovim and haven’t looked back!

I really hope to be able to use helix again in the future though, there was a speed advantage in helix and less janky window management.

But for me to do that they might have to allow full vim motions as well

There are a number of reasons I use Helix but one of them is the maintainers’ approach to managing development of the editor and accepting (or not) contributions.

For me, slow and opinionated is a feature, not a bug.

I think so too, a lot of my friends have told me they had a great experience with helix, but vim keybinds are rooted too deep, and it's also the sunk cost of having built the config over an entire year. But, I think I would give it a try sparingly.

Am poet who uses helix!

For what it's worth, this is actually one of the strong-points of helix. Many of the key-bindings display an unobtrusive list of follow-up actions that close without any lag if you already know what you're looking for. It's worth trying specifically because of how much effort has gone into being easier to pick up and get started with than something like vanilla vim.

Who doesn't like high quality! But in reality many high quality contributions are rejected, so all you're left with is "opinionated" where the opinion doesn't match yours

I used vim for about twenty years, and I'm mostly happy having moved from neovim to helix.

The main thing I miss in helix is solid debugging support and slime style repl support - but I never had that working in vim.

The other thing I'm missing in ruby is "go-to definition" automatically working with dependencies, allowing to go to the source code by "opening" gems - tpope has/had some amazing stuff for ruby development with vim.

That said - I like how helix is more discoverable (pop up context menu), has sane/great defaults and out of the box experience - and I like the select-apply or subject-verb and multi cursor workflow better than vim verb-subject flow.

I recommend trying to go through the tutorial and see if fits.

I'm hoping plugin support will open the door to some improved go-to-definiton support - I'd love to be able to go "up" to edit/view dependencies be that libc source code, java, rust crates etc.

> I’m bad enough remembering cut/copy/paste keyboard shortcuts in different OS/applications.

Change them to be the same! It's indeed a waste to have a difference for such fundamental keybinds

Same with Helix - there is a vim layout out there, no need to use a different set (unless, of course, you can use something better, but then you should also use it in vim)

It's mostly worked out cleanly, there's a ton of re-use of vim-isms. Now I just can't use vim anymore.

Not yet in release branch, afaik

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/401

I gave helix a serious shot for a week, converting shortcuts and adapting to helix's way. In the end I couldn't find any advantage to it over my vim setup. It was not plug and play it was not configuration free, it was not noticeably faster. It was just full of negatives. Little gripes like the one you mention. Vim just seems to do everything better with fewer popups and selection flashes.

If you don't have one already, here's an autocmd I use for that https://gist.github.com/shorsher/93b747bf5c4209f45ef0304aa50...