helix

This is the dependency list of the just command runner https://github.com/casey/just/blob/master/Cargo.lock And the helix editor https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/Cargo.lock Compare them to the dependencies of gnu make (pretty sure it’s only posix) https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/m... And vim https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/c... ### Downloading the internet to build a smallish software is always bad in my opinion.

Oh interesting, I went to look more after you said that and noticed the lack of activity indeed, there's even a discussion about it: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/16261 That said, fwiw, I haven't felt the need for anything on it and it feels "complete" to me as far as my daily use goes Maintaining OSS is tough, do you know what the community has been wanting lately that it lacks? Maybe I'm an outlier user or I don't know what I don't know

Commenting as an outsider to both projects, one possible motivation to fork Helix might be this PR: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675 Helix was originally meant to be a "batteries included" editor without any scripting/plugins. That PR intends to change this and so there is a bit of controversy around it. Overall it looks like the PR will eventually be merged. The Mitos fork could have be made for totally unrelated reasons. This is really just my speculation.

Tangential but one day when bored at work, I browsed the GitHub discussions for Helix, my main text editor, and the most active thread was regarding adopting an LLM policy for the repo[0]. The maintainer thought it would be beneficial to use an LLM policy similar to Ghostty which is AI friendly with human review. Now the whole topic is "brigaded" by a small number of extremely passionate anti-AI voices that immediately react positively to any pushback against AI usage and negatively to anyone who isn't staunchly anti-AI. Even when presented with, in my opinion, reasonable middle-ground such as only merging maintainable code, the counter-arguments are mostly against the harms of AI (mostly datacenter related) dismissing AI outright and refusal give an any ground. It's a real impasse where the pro-AI or indifferent opinions seem to simply

Being a better version of something is an invitation, not an imposition! I'm not a developer and never have been, I study literatureand I use a modal editor for all my writing. If you've ever used Ctrl+C to copy, you've already done something harder than the core concept of modal editing. Modal editing is simpler: you press a single key, and you switch to one (of two) modes. That's it. That's the thing people find intimidating. In one mode the letters you press show up on the screen, in the other the letters you press select/copy/move/etc (like cntrl+c... Except even simpler you only need to press one key). You have to use keyboard keys to go up and down, which I assume you already have some experience with. Learning it is identical to learning a GUI. In Word, you hunt through menus for the word 'cut' or 'paste' and click it. In a modal e

Worth noting: the plugin system is steadily approaching maturity and will probably be integrated and released soonish™ https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675

> Helix I'm not sure about the other ones, but I know that helix supports language servers by default and it does not have a workspace trust system like vscode, so LSPs can automatically execute code when you enter a directory https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/9514#issuecomme... So uninstalling VSCode would be a bit of a step back in that case

Here's one way to see. Look at closed PRs with "changes requested" reviews: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Ac...

Not yet in release branch, afaik https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/401

I keep trying Helix but just got hit by wq freeze issue, opened since 2022, so I wonder sometimes if its ready. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2059

Worth mentioning that while this was very nice work by a Helix enthusiast, it was proposed as a replacement for the official docs and mostly rejected, and for good reasons IMO. An instructive discussion! https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/12127#issuecommen... 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. Or at least, if you do, do it for your own education and don't have high expectations that it will be merged. The contributor in question had a very good attitude about it.

I'm a mostly happy helix user - but I'm still struggling to get debugging to work - both with ruby/rails and typescript/node (Adonis). Apparently DAP protocol support has been merged - but I find the documentation lacking, and afaik for typescript/javascript it won't work out of the box, as helix needs a pointers to the dap server (and that can't simply be in PATH)? How are everyone debugging with Helix? https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/9269

Helix's features look very cool, but I could not switch to it because of this bug [0]. It has been open since May 2022 and it is still not fixed. Basically you can't exit insert mode with a key combination like `jk`. Four years feels like a long time for such a basic bug. I will stick to NeoVim for now. 0. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2612

I've noticed that editors tend to struggle much more with long lines than long files (many lines), even in 2025 with a recent computer. For example, I was recently working with a csv with 50 columns, and each value was a bit long. Things got sluggish at the end of the lines in Helix [0][1][2]. (side note: diffing this kind of files is also a pain, too, but that's another story) It isn't the first time I notice this issue (the first time I tried diffing some minified Javascript with 100k+ long lines). So I guess it might be due to syntax highlighting on top of text encoding [3]. (To partially answer my own question: this performance metric is probably not tested nor optimised for in the first place. And also because not every edit/movement uses async rendering). [0]: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/4513 [1]: https://github.com

Plugins, coming to a release near you: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/8675#issuecomment... Or you could check out the branch where the plugin system and the community's plugins have been kicking around for a while now