Because of editor developer shenanigans, I all of a sudden gathered spoons to try the Helix editor. And boy, howdy, going back to an editor that only works in the command line has opened an interesting yak shaving expedition.
Ya see, I've been using GUI IDEs/editors since before neovim was a thing, when I lost the energy to mess with my vim config after it broke, I went to vscode with a vim keybinding addon and stayed there because it was good enough, and it had become the place where extensions appeared first. So there I stayed, until vscode became too aggressive with its AI stuff, and I decided to check out zed. Granted, zed also had AI functionality but it had a kill switch that made it all disappear. Zed was amazingly fast, and made switching from vscode super easy, and I was happier.
Then the last few weeks happened; Zed's updated their weird terms of service to be weirder, (which I never agreed to because I installed the arch package), and vim had the most embarrassing slop PR conversations one could think of.
So, I felt the sudden urge to change the main tool of my trade once again, and no dear reader, unlike some people, I don't consider the slop machine a tool of my trade.
So I looked at neovim, which sadly triggered the claude block warning, but didn't seem as brainwormed as vim yet. I heard about gram, which was an unfucked version of zed, but when I looked at it, wasn't properly packaged for my setup. Then I also looked at helix, which some people have said good things about, especially about its different take on modal editing, and it didn't have any obvious signs of slop at all.
As I had the spoons, I decided to try this helix thingamajig for a week, and see how it would mess up my muscle memory, which has been abused by vi(m)-style keybindings since the 90s.
This is all a long winded way to say that I am now back on a pure terminal-based development setup and... wow this stuff improved.
I discovered Zellij, which redefined what I thought of as a terminal multiplexer. I've used tmux for a long time, and screen before that, but Zellij makes its panes feel like discrete windows when it comes to selecting text and mouse controls.
Helix is very interesting, it sure is messing up my muscle memory, but it sure feels like it might be worth it, as some more complex stuff feels more logical than it ever did in vim. And because of the language server protocol, it does all the rust/go/etc operations just as good as zed or vscode did, better even, as I find the UI calmer and less surprising than I did in those GUI editors.
I've also been playing with lazygit and yazi, although not as much, as I've always used bash/zsh/fish for git and file management, so my need for those isn't too great. And then there's a whole lot of other small modern CLI tools that make life better, like fd, replacing find, sd replacing sed, and more.
The point of this long, barely coherent rant is to get off my chest just how much nicer terminal based development has become since last I gave it a proper go, and that if you haven't looked at this in a long time, or even ever, it might be worth a try.
#Terminal #CLI #HelixEditor #Helix #Zed #tmux #Zellij #VSCode #SoftwareDevelopment #vim #neovim
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Pelle Wessman
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