I’ve tried the Helix editor and, to be honest, I’m split. I have three specific things to say, though.
First, from a user perspective, the keyboard shortcuts are different enough from Vim to be quite annoying (you can’t get rid of 20 years of muscle memory just like that!) Also, in those 20 years of using Vim, I’ve cumulated enough customizations in my .vimrc to find lots of missing things in Helix.
Second, I found Helix to be kinda useless in general. It does not really bring anything new to the table of text editors; don’t get me wrong: it’s not that it’s bad, it just isn’t for me. It does its job well, it’s stable, it’s solid, it’s fast, blah blah. But… what else? Nothing, really.
Third, and maybe the least popular one: am I right if I say that the only advantage of Helix is that it’s built with Rust? If that’s the case, it raises another question in me: is Rust an advantage for desktop apps? I’m seriously asking. Because no, I don’t think it is.
In general, I totally subscribe with the argument that operating systems, “server-side” apps, and security-sensitive systems have lots to win when developed with Rust and its really strong type system. But desktop apps? Editors?
Lately there’s been a rush to rewrite everything in Rust and I can’t help but thinking that this is stupid.
So, thanks but no, thanks. Not everything needs to be rewritten in Rust. Maybe Helix doesn’t need to be. Maybe I’m wrong, and time will tell. Maybe in 10 years from now I’ll be using Helix full-time. But that time is definitely not today.
PS: I have the same feelings about other popular, recent apps “written in Rust”, like Warp, for example.