From Helix to Neovim
A year ago, I decided to try Helix. “The joy of learning Helix (and probably other modal, terminal-based editors)” reveals more about the motivations and initial impressions. A few weeks after playing around with it, I adopted it as a daily driver. I love Helix, its simplicity, the set of features it comes with, the documentation, and the community behind it. Learning this tool made me a more efficient programmer, a better typist, and, due to the underlying technologies, I learned a lot about LSPs, Tree-sitter, terminal emulators, and shells.
On the way, I hit a few roadblocks, though. A few of these nuanced or less popular features can make or break your experience. So, after resisting for a while, I made the switch to Neovim. It wasn’t love at first sight for sure. Let me share why I abandoned Helix and what my initial impressions of using Neovim are.
Missing piece of Helix
It all comes down to a missing package manager. I don’t want to tell you about all the occasions I was looking for something and I ended up with “it is out of scope of the core Helix, and should be implemented as a plugin”. Code folding, file tree, snippets, extended git functionalities to name a few.
The plugin system is coming to Helix soon, but the feature is still in the making at the time of writing this article. It will take a while longer for the plugins ecosystem to reach maturity and partial parity with what Neovim has to offer. I can wait, but my clients’ projects cannot, and sadly this is the main reason for me switching to Neovim.
My experience of switching from Helix to Neovim
As much as I loved Helix on day one, I cannot say the same about Neovim. I like
the select > act philosophy adopted by Helix more than Vim’s opposite
strategy. I think it is easier and more predictable, so getting used to the
act > move model used by Neovim took a while. Too often I land in visual mode
to make a selection to trigger an action on it, instead of performing the same
with a few keystrokes in normal mode. One of the hard habits to break coming
from Helix.
Helix comes with very sane defaults, and configuration is limited to a minimum. Neovim configuration has a reputation for being notoriously complicated, but it is actually not that hard. After learning some basics of Lua, it is super satisfying to do whatever the hell you want with your editor. The core of Neovim is super powerful on its own, but the real fun comes when you throw a few plugins into the mix. There is an endless number of resources out there, but I would like to highlight two that I found super helpful on my journey.
- TJ DeVries on YouTube. Core contributor to Neovim and author of plugins used by the majority of Neovim users. He recorded an endless number of videos dedicated to Neovim. If you are just starting, “The Only Video You Need to Get Started with Neovim” is a great primer where he goes through kickstart.nvim, which he also created.
- “Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought” by Drew Neil is is a collection of tips that do not require any additional tools other than a core Vim. This books helped me a lot to understand the core philosoplhy of this tool.
I don’t want to offend any die-hard Helix fans by writing this post. I have mentioned enough times how much I like this tool. One year is a decent time to give something a try and shape an opinion about it. I am keeping my fingers crossed for the future development of Helix and, most importantly, its plugins ecosystem.
If you have had a similar experience, please share your story with me in the comments section below. Alternatively, you can find me on Mastodon and Bluesky, because that happens to be the place where plenty of folks have recently moved. Fuck Twitter, fuck Elon. X is a stupid name anyway. Bye 👋