Do you have any specific examples of things helix does better than neovim?
I think the neovim implementation of LSP and treesitter is quite nice. It was not that polished when I tried it last, but I think once it becomes mature, it will be really flexible. Tree sitter specifically is still considered experimental, but I think the timeline for that to be better integrated will be significantly faster than it takes for any new editor to get a decently sized community around it.
The zero config part of it is nice, but I think you’d be competing with e.g. VSCode with modal bindings on that note. Vim/Neovim have always had a fairly steep learning curve, and I can’t see that aspect of it mattering as significantly, especially since I only see LSP/Treesitter support improving in neovim.
There's a difference between having a "learning curve" and having to spend effort setting up things that work out of the box in another editor.
Vim advocates generally claim that investing time learning the Vim keybindings pays off as saved time during later work. But that's not what's happening here. If LSP just works in Helix, and requires fiddling with config files in Neovim, then Neovim is wasting my time, not teaching me something that will be valuable later on.
Yeah, learning curve may not be the best way to phrase it. But I think that is the price of flexibility to be able to create an editor in which you don’t have to use LSP if you don’t want to.
Personally, I think keeping Neovim the editor separate from something like nvim-lspconfig is pretty nice right now, to be able to update them separately, which is nice for new languages and language server changes. Maybe it (and the broader LSP ecosystem) will eventually be mature enough to be included by default.
I’d also say that if you want zero config, just using a config framework (there are a few), gets you most of the way there, whilst retaining more of the flexibility but that’s not a strong point in favour of Neovim.
Still, until Helix gets a comparable community and some features over a properly configured neovim, I think it will be hard to displace it (and Vim, EMacs etc.) because Helix doesn’t currently doesn’t as anything significant for existing users.
Any sufficiently complex "one-time setup cost" quickly becomes an ongoing maintenance quagmire. And I say that as a full-time neovim user for the past seven years.
Neovim is still my favorite vi, but I think I erred when I started bolting on so many plugins and supporting processes... when I want a lightweight IDE, I'll use VS Code.
> One time setup cost is a small factor in choosing an editor.
Perhaps for you, but empirically for devs as a population, this is very clearly false. A large part of the reason for VSCode's near-takeover for new devs in the last few years is its frictionless setup for almost everything.
Sometimes treesitter has problems. Indenting has gotten worse and configuration is a lot more complex.
I have the same config with some neovim / vim specifics and I find myself using vim more often even though the neovim features are "cooler".
I wonder if it will ever become "mature". It doesn't crash for that matter, but you have to keep everything updated constantly. Vim doesn't really have that problem.
Helix looks cool too, but I was looking for what it has that the others don't have and I can't figure it out. The website just makes it seem like it's cooler than the others.
Treesitter is still a bit iffy. LSP is a bit better, but is still not amazingly mature (but some of this is to do with the LSP servers themselves not being that mature).
Other than that, I haven’t had any problems with Neovim. Everything else has been rock solid, and I haven’t needed to update frequently for anything else. Have you experienced other issues?
However, these are the larger “killer” features of neovim, so at this point there’s not that much over Vim. However, there aren’t any Vim features I use that are missing in Neovim either. There are a couple of minor things that push Neovim over though (`inccommand`, Lua is marginally nicer, Neovim plugin scene has exploded recently).
So since Neovim (for me) has feature parity and equal reliability, with some really nice added frills and some moderately reliable, but maybe not incredibly mature, killer features it still beats Vim in my book.
For me personally is better because it works out of the box and their built in features are most of the things I need, fuzzy finder for files in the project, opened buffers, LSP, syntax highlight, etc.
If you are an old vim/nvim user, you already know deeply your editor/ecosystem and your config file is very solid, you definitely won't like helix at least yet, you need to learn to do everything the helix way and not the vim/nvim customised way you build all those years.
So I will say that for developers that are starting using terminal editors, helix is a very good starting point, because of the built in stuff that it seems essential at this point in time for an editor to already have and that might be what helix does better.
I think the neovim implementation of LSP and treesitter is quite nice. It was not that polished when I tried it last, but I think once it becomes mature, it will be really flexible. Tree sitter specifically is still considered experimental, but I think the timeline for that to be better integrated will be significantly faster than it takes for any new editor to get a decently sized community around it.
The zero config part of it is nice, but I think you’d be competing with e.g. VSCode with modal bindings on that note. Vim/Neovim have always had a fairly steep learning curve, and I can’t see that aspect of it mattering as significantly, especially since I only see LSP/Treesitter support improving in neovim.