this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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Vim still has a lot of advantages over helix. Being modern doesn't automatically make a tool better
e.g.?
The biggest thing missing from helix right now imo is plugin support, so a lot of plugins that I really like wouldn't be available. I use fugitive a lot for working with git for example.
Another one is the quickfix list in combination with ex commands. One thing you can do for example is setup
:maketo run your compiler and then when you get compilation errors they'll show up in your quickfix list. You can then use:Cfilterto focus on one type of error and then:cdoto for example do a find and replace on the remaining lines.In general, if I don't have an lsp available for whatever reason (I work in cmake a fair amount at my $DAYJOB for example) I would much rather use vim, in particular because of the stuff that you can do with ex commands that I mentioned above (also works great with grep) but also because of the ctags support.
Helix can do a lot of nice things out of the box for a lot of cases of software editing, but it's not nearly as broad or as customizable of a tool as vim
Yea I mean it depends obviously on the use case. But the defaults in Helix properly reached this millennium compared to vim, where you first need to get through guides in order to understand how to properly set it up.
Helix has better defaults for sure and I get why people might prefer it but I have a very hard time imagining it being a better choice than vim in every situation even with a lot more development.
Also, if you work with programming for example your editor is going to be one of your main tools and I think that "reading guides" is an acceptable amount of effort to put in to learning such a tool. Vim has a higher barrier of entry than it needs to (this can to some extent be explained with backwards compatability) but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.
With Vim you have that as well.