Love Helix. Congrats. Good looking default theme. Sensible defaults. Literally install and use, no configuration needed. Well I haven't replaced my IDE with it , but set alias of vi to it and made it as $EDITOR for all quick cli edits. So now whenever I need to do quick debugging edits in k9s, it calls for Helix.
Helix is the most interesting editor I've seen in a while. Very sane configuration — my config includes just one line to change the default theme to something with more contrast.
No "AI" shit pushed down your throat, and it takes the vim idea of applying actions to blocks of code, and swaps them around — you first select the code, and then apply an action to it. So you get visual feedback before doing the action and can clearly see what's going to be changed without having to spam visual mode all the time.
There was a decent article recently which explains some of the things I like in it also:
I love Helix, I highly recommend it to anyone who never quite got on board with vim but likes the idea of it. I found it much easier to learn and use, and it is distinguished from other vimlikes in that it's got a useful starting configuration.
I really wanted to like Helix, and for the most part did, but there is something about the way undo works that just feels incredibly wrong to me. What it wants to undo doesn't always seem logical and always undoes too much. I've lost work because of it in the past.
I terribly need a vim-like with Helix all-in-one comprehensiveness. Neovim distributions are too loosely coupled and always have some odd sharp edge. Vim and its interfaces needs some rethinking anyway, but keep Action-Object modal orientation.
Helix is great and includes a lot of stuff out of the box (file pickers, syntax highlighting, linting etc) without any configuration or installing plugins (contrary to vim or neovim).
I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete the character under the cursor or "d" to wait for the motion before deleting anything. When this does not happen I get confused and angry. I think this would be a problem with most people that are using vim; it's very difficult to change your habits especially since you can't ever escape from vim because of its ubiquity.
Thankfully, some good people have released evil-helix, a soft fork of Helix which introduces Vim keybindings https://github.com/usagi-flow/evil-helix ; I tried it and it works great so I'll totally recommend it to people that have my problems.
As a final notice, helix (and evil-helix) works great in Windows (cmd). No need to install rust or anything. Get the .exe and you're gtg.
I am happy for helix but i don't think it's a good fit for me.
I use Neovim. It does what i want it to do. It's one of the best available options. But, i am not completely satisfied with it. I personally want an editor with following:
* Modern codebase. Written from scratch.
* VIM Keybindings: I have muscle memory of Vim. I would like to use Vim Keybindings in my editor. I don't want to use any other keybindings even if they are proclaimed to be better. It must walk like vim and quack like vim.
* Good defaults. I hate configuring a lot. Neovim requires configuring a lot and need not always provide good defaults if it provided. Helix might have gotten this right.
* Based on Treesitter. Better they run Treesitter parsers as a WASM in WASM runtime just like how Zed and latest Neovim do.
* Extension System. But, I don't really favor lua, js or scheme. They just aren't my cup of tea. Maybe make it a wasm module with only necessary functions exposed to it. And configuration of those plugins in non turning complete configuration language.
* TUI and optional GUI
* LSP,DAP and Snippets support built-in(along with auto complete/suggestions, UI for Testing and Debugging)
* Oil.nvim like FS as buffer built-in
* Telescope/FZF-lua style Search built-in
* Git integration built-in (Maybe magit/neogit like GIT UI is welcome)
* Flash.nvim style Treesitter based Code AST Manipulation and Jump-to by label built-in
Does anyone know which terminal is being used in the screencast?
I'm asking because I noticed slight pixel misalignments in some of the videos. For example, in the File Explorer demo, the window border isn't a solid outline—it has small gaps in the frame. I’m wondering if using a terminal like Ghostty might fix that.
I love the example with git blame for the current line. Helix is my daily driver alongside lazygit, however I much appreciate a tighter integration of Git in Helix. A colleague showed me what he can do with magit in emacs, and that was some next-level stuff (e.g. cycling the buffer through the Git history of the file). Previously I was using Neovim, but I'm really happy with my switch to Helix. So much less config, keybindings I find more intuitive and multi-cursor editing. For agentic coding I'm looking into Aider and OpenCode. I expect a tool like that to join my terminal setup with Helix and lazygit.
Been using helix for over a year (mostly Elixir development) after a decade of (neo)vim, very happy so far! My config file is like 10 lines long :D
Congrats on the release!
I'd love for Helix to implement a "Kakoune mode". I develop on Windows at work, where Kakoune is not ideal, so Helix seems like it'd be a perfect fit, except I can't get over the keybindings. Its keybinding philosophy encourages verbosity instead of Kakoune's terseness, which bothers me more than it probably should, and as far as I can tell its keymap configuration isn't yet powerful enough to emulate Kakoune well.
Vim's inconsistent keybinds and behavior are what pushed me to Kakoune — which I find has more consistent and elegant bindings and behavior — in the first place, and Helix feels like a step backwards on that front.
The file explorer is something I’ve been really wanting. But I really want to be able to quickly create, rename, delete the way I can in netrw. I use netrw like this all the time.
Injections / nested tree-sitter scopes is neat. I guess this means it can highlight html template code where html, js, css and the template syntax all have highlights?
Great editor, switched from neovim and can't get enough of it. The software where I really exited about new releases. No issues for me, and only good vibes ahead. Thanks devs
This is great. I have been daily driving Helix for a few years now and every release has been really exciting. Still anxiously waiting on a plugin system, but that’s more of a bonus than a need.
I'm a long time Vim user, and I really liked Helix when I tried it last year. On one hand, I very much like the cleanliness of the whole project. On the other hand, I'm one of those people who find AI assisted coding useful (not vibe coding, just auto complete, auto edit suggestion, possibility to select block and make it do change on it). This is why I eventually started to move to VS Code with Cody, despite being way more comfortable in modal editors.
Very detailed explanations. I learned a bunch about the syntax highlighting and code understanding in Helix & friends just from reading this.
All the tree-sitter features and datastructures seem ideal for a query language to be bolted on - something that generalises beyond symbol search or “find all references” - guess since there’s an API this is a DSL for writing queries about your code.
27 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 44.9 ms ] threadNo "AI" shit pushed down your throat, and it takes the vim idea of applying actions to blocks of code, and swaps them around — you first select the code, and then apply an action to it. So you get visual feedback before doing the action and can clearly see what's going to be changed without having to spam visual mode all the time.
There was a decent article recently which explains some of the things I like in it also:
https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/06/i-like-helix/
I would definitely use it but the main disadvantage is that some keybindings work differently than vim. I understand that the keybindings may be better that the vim ones but after years of using vim I expect "x" in normal mode to delete the character under the cursor or "d" to wait for the motion before deleting anything. When this does not happen I get confused and angry. I think this would be a problem with most people that are using vim; it's very difficult to change your habits especially since you can't ever escape from vim because of its ubiquity.
Thankfully, some good people have released evil-helix, a soft fork of Helix which introduces Vim keybindings https://github.com/usagi-flow/evil-helix ; I tried it and it works great so I'll totally recommend it to people that have my problems.
As a final notice, helix (and evil-helix) works great in Windows (cmd). No need to install rust or anything. Get the .exe and you're gtg.
I am happy for helix but i don't think it's a good fit for me.
I use Neovim. It does what i want it to do. It's one of the best available options. But, i am not completely satisfied with it. I personally want an editor with following:
* Modern codebase. Written from scratch.
* VIM Keybindings: I have muscle memory of Vim. I would like to use Vim Keybindings in my editor. I don't want to use any other keybindings even if they are proclaimed to be better. It must walk like vim and quack like vim.
* Good defaults. I hate configuring a lot. Neovim requires configuring a lot and need not always provide good defaults if it provided. Helix might have gotten this right.
* Based on Treesitter. Better they run Treesitter parsers as a WASM in WASM runtime just like how Zed and latest Neovim do.
* Extension System. But, I don't really favor lua, js or scheme. They just aren't my cup of tea. Maybe make it a wasm module with only necessary functions exposed to it. And configuration of those plugins in non turning complete configuration language.
* TUI and optional GUI
* LSP,DAP and Snippets support built-in(along with auto complete/suggestions, UI for Testing and Debugging)
* Oil.nvim like FS as buffer built-in
* Telescope/FZF-lua style Search built-in
* Git integration built-in (Maybe magit/neogit like GIT UI is welcome)
* Flash.nvim style Treesitter based Code AST Manipulation and Jump-to by label built-in
* Macros and Multi cursors
* Optional Cursor Style AI integration (Chat UI)
I'm asking because I noticed slight pixel misalignments in some of the videos. For example, in the File Explorer demo, the window border isn't a solid outline—it has small gaps in the frame. I’m wondering if using a terminal like Ghostty might fix that.
And looking at the video it seems to be tui based. Nice. Gave me Emacs tui vibes.
Vim's inconsistent keybinds and behavior are what pushed me to Kakoune — which I find has more consistent and elegant bindings and behavior — in the first place, and Helix feels like a step backwards on that front.
All the tree-sitter features and datastructures seem ideal for a query language to be bolted on - something that generalises beyond symbol search or “find all references” - guess since there’s an API this is a DSL for writing queries about your code.
Does something like this exist?