From Vim to Helix

The last year seems to have been the biggest change in developer tools ever. If you’re reading the discourse you can’t go more than 5 minutes without seeing someone talking about their new development environment, new ways of editing code, and the huge productivity gains the tools they use are affording them. A recurring theme of these posts is that anyone who doesn’t pick up the very latest tools will be outpaced by those that have adopted them. Up until this point my go-to editor has been whatever version of Vim was installed on my system. I’d been doing this for about 9 years, and it was comfortable. For the last three months I’ve been using Helix, and it’s been working quite well. The quick overview of Helix is that it’s a modern implementation of a modal editor. It is heavily inspired by Vim, but isn’t aiming to be backwards compatible (unlike Neovim). It has LSP (language server protocol) support built-in (like Neovim) which makes it easy to get IDE-like features for a variety…