No it is not. It depends on the codebase - if it is something relatively new, a proof of concept or something that is bound to change soon, there is no point in slowing the development down just because it is “too large to digest”.

I’ve tried helix and used it for work today. At first, it was super slow, relearning how to jump between buffers, but at the end of the day, i got decent at it.

But I cannot hjkl. It’s just unnatural. The moment I stop thinking about it, my hand is back at arrow keys.

R without tidyverse is like php without laravel

That’s a good argument. The editing speed is not the limiting factor in my workflow.

Honestly, I think my interest for modal editing is a bit irrational. Maybe I don’t want to be a normie, using the default keybindings :D

Haha, I know that feeling from earlier when I was trying out hx --tutor. Just staring a the keyboard trying to remember which key to press, only to press the wrong one and have it do something completely unexpected.

Thanks for the overview. I’ll work with tutor and see how frustrated I get :D

Regarding language servers:

Recently, I got into this philosophy of “every project needs a declarative environment”. It means that there is a committed file that should contain all tooling need to work with the project. Compilers, formatters, test runners and also: language servers.

This fights with vscode extensions which try to be clever and download their language server / bundle it into the extension itself. “No, rust-analyzer, I don’t want your build because it does not work with xtensa target arch I’m using in this project”.

So actually, this ties nicely with helix not providing the language servers itself, but allowing you to bring your own.

That’s the thing: I do feel vscode being slow. On my work machine, it’s fine - it takes about two seconds to open a project from start. But on my older laptop, that’s a solid 10 sec before I can start editing.

A coworker has told me that in a previous job, he was talking to an intern and mentioned IRC and intern asked what was that. He told him that it is the “old instant messaging”, which another senior coworker overheard and chimed in that “no, IRC is the new messaging thing”.

If someone would be asking be what netbean is, I’d say “an IDE from the old generation of editors”, but I guess that is all relative :D

was concerned about missing out on learning more standard vim bindings and functionality.

What do you mean? Do the standard vim bindings have some specific quality that you are after? Or do you work with many different servers and would have to use what ever editor is installed there?

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.

Do you use “home” “end” “ctrl-arrow” or any other interesting keybindings?