Does Helix have no way to go back to the last editing position when re-opening a file? Similar to: '" in vim? That is going to be a deal-breaker for me. One reason I use vim over many other options is that I jump in and out of files a lot, having to find my last position in many cases is a chore.
I gave helix a serious shot for a week, converting shortcuts and adapting to helix's way. In the end I couldn't find any advantage to it over my vim setup. It was not plug and play it was not configuration free, it was not noticeably faster. It was just full of negatives. Little gripes like the one you mention. Vim just seems to do everything better with fewer popups and selection flashes.
Personally I find helix is basically vim with selection oriented editing borrowed from kakoune, which is fine I guess. Real kakoune has another radical idea that helix doesn’t touch though, which is its thorough unix integration. If vim is vi for the Amiga, kakoune is vim for unix, bringing things full circle.
Yeah, I gave it a very fair shot. Got pretty good at it too. But I’m back to Vim too.
Things I loved: no plugins. Native LSP integration. The pickers are a lot faster and nicer than what I can get in neovim after absolutely atrocious configs.
Things I liked: w and e selects the word. I kinda got used to that and miss it in vim now.
Things I loathed: there is no clear mental model of what will get selected on a motion. Something like selecting a paragraph (V } in vim) is replaced with a (gf) which doesn’t ever do exactly what I want.
Overall, the annoyances outweighed the benefits. I wish evil-helix all the luck. I would use it but it kinda sucks on Mac rn since you have to whitelist every library used.
The more I think about this, the more I'm leaning towards the opinion: Being able to get back to where you were when you were last editing a file, is table stakes in a programmers editor. But Kakoune and Helix both don't seem to do it (kak has "ga", which just doesn't seem to work on either system I've tried it, both running 2025 versions. So maybe I'm wrong there. But the last thing I want to do when I edit a file is to hunt for the code or bread crumbs of where I was. I really like the direction Helix is leaning in, but it's hard to take it seriously as a code editor if I can't get back to where I was. I guess vim has just spoiled me in that regard.
