Do you use “home” “end” “ctrl-arrow” or any other interesting keybindings?

I used to use Jetbrains when I was using C# (mostly stopped now), because it was better that VS and tooling elsewhere is mediocre, on purpose by ms. But beyond that I don’t see the point. I say that as someone who has it for free through a student license. They’re such heavy editors, only kinda cross language, extension ecosystem not as good as vscode.

Great default keybindings though, I’ve adopted a lot of them elsewhere too

Same. Jetbrains makes the best IDEs hands down IMO and I say this after 20 years of coding and using numerous IDEs. I also use vscode as a backup but as more of a glorified text editor.

A coworker has told me that in a previous job, he was talking to an intern and mentioned IRC and intern asked what was that. He told him that it is the “old instant messaging”, which another senior coworker overheard and chimed in that “no, IRC is the new messaging thing”.

If someone would be asking be what netbean is, I’d say “an IDE from the old generation of editors”, but I guess that is all relative :D

I took a look at Helix when I was trying to learn vim and found it very easy to get started with, but was concerned about missing out on learning more standard vim bindings and functionality.

I found LazyVim + NeoVim got me pretty much the same experience without diverging as much from vim. Mostly I appreciate having access to a cheatsheet for commands.

Yeah, keybindings are well thought out. The most off-putting thing of default vim is that there are about 5 different “delete” commands. One for a character, one for the whole line, one for selected text, one for end of line. In helix, this is all just “delete selected text” and then “x” is for selecting a line. Make so much more sense.

That’s how I ended up with a latex plugin for intellij

There is more value in understanding how to extend and customize your editor than in searching for a new one. Use whatever your workplace provides the best support for, and then customize it from there.

I think there’s something to be said for shaking up your environment periodically as well and trying new things. Sure, there’s a week where you edit at a snails pace, followed by a month where you edit a bit slower than normal, but different tools really do have different pros and cons.

For the code bases I’ve worked in, this evolved from necessity as the code files were so large many editors were struggling, the rules for the style so custom that editors can’t be properly configured to match, or the editor performance in general was questionable.

I went through a journey of sorts from IDEs to Electron based editors to Emacs and currently am working with Kakoune (and I’ve passed over a bunch of other editors like Sublime, Helix, and Zed that couldn’t meet my requirements or didn’t match my sensibilities – even though a thing or two here or there really was excellent). Pretty much every change has been the result of the editor pain points that couldn’t be addressed without actually working on the editor itself.

Modal editing for just raw text input would actually be slower, because you also enter and leave Insert Mode. I find it’s very fast and powerful for navigating around the text, which you probably do a lot more than actually editing it. And when it does come to editing, there are a lot of higher-level tools (at least in Vim) for accomplishing things more quickly, like the ‘s’ command and ‘q’ macros.

I think getting into a mental “flow” state is really valuable, and muscle memory is important for being able to stay there. If your muscle memory is to navigate around using the mouse, that’s great, but Vim feels faster to me.

That’s a good argument. The editing speed is not the limiting factor in my workflow.

Honestly, I think my interest for modal editing is a bit irrational. Maybe I don’t want to be a normie, using the default keybindings :D

In my personal experience, it’s a little faster but not a huge speed difference. However, it’s much more pleasant and ergonomic. I enjoy the act of modal editing much more than modeless.

I used vi for a few years so have the muscle memory and the sole advantage in my perception was that everything is simple typing with hands remaining in the home keys position (except Escape, ironically).

So it’s more relaxed if you find using modifiers onerous, but I don’t find Ctrl or Alt significantly worse than Shift, and I don’t find it any worthwhile advantage.

Input speed is not “just” input speed. Note: I’m not about to argue for or against modal editors, I just want to answer: why is input speed really really really important, when (we agree) its not a big percent of total time.

5min at 80mph over a bumpy dirt path, ripping around turns is very very different than 5min of flat smooth straight driving.

A senior and junior dev could spend the same amount of time to rename a var across 15 files, move a function to a new file, comment out two blocks, comment one back in, etc. But. When I try to have a conversation while they do that, or when I change my mind and tell the junior to undo all that, its a massive emotional drain on them… because (if they’re fast) they’re driving 80mph over a crappy dirt road.

The input speed isn’t a big deal because its a large chunk of time, it’s a big deal because pausing a conversation/mental thread for 5 seconds while you wait for some typing to finish is incredibly disruptive/jarring to the thought process itself.

Those mental pause-and-resumes cause untold number of bugs, and THAT is where the real time sink happens.

If you’re already at the point where there’s no “pauses in the conversation” then I’d agree, there’s not much benefit in increasing input speed on its own. BUT there’s almost always some task, like converting all vars (but not imported methods) in a project to camel case from snake case, that are big enough to choke the conversation even for a senior dev. Increasing input speed is often decreasing how often the conversation gets interrupted.

Speed of editing is rarely a bottleneck when editing code

It’s not just that though, its moving around your code. Being able to jump between matching brackets, follow references etc. it’s just quicker and easier with a modal editor.

I do still use sublime as a “note” app, where I a “cheatsheet” open with a bunch of common commands I need for our project + a todo.

I happily use Helix for Rust, etc projects, and as a general editor. I switch back to VSCode for TypeScript/Svelte projects because the plugins make it more productive for me. I do miss the editing experience and need to check if there’s a VSCode plugin that lets me not confuse my muscle memory.

Helix was the thing that finally made me remap my caps lock key to esc.

I’ve recently taken to kakoune which was one of the inspirations for Helix.

It’s not as fancy (in terms of built-in features) out of the box, but it’s very performant, integrates with tmux well, and for the C++ and Python I’m writing I haven’t felt the need for much beyond token based word completion and grep.

The client server model it uses has really let me improve my tmux skills because I’m working inside of it more and using it for editor splits.

I don’t know if Helix does this, but I’ve also come to love the pipe operator (where you just pipe a selection into some external program and the selection gets replaced with the output, so you can use the e.g. the sort command to sort text). You can also pretty easily add in custom extensions via command line programs.

Thanks for the overview. I’ll work with tutor and see how frustrated I get :D

Regarding language servers:

Recently, I got into this philosophy of “every project needs a declarative environment”. It means that there is a committed file that should contain all tooling need to work with the project. Compilers, formatters, test runners and also: language servers.

This fights with vscode extensions which try to be clever and download their language server / bundle it into the extension itself. “No, rust-analyzer, I don’t want your build because it does not work with xtensa target arch I’m using in this project”.

So actually, this ties nicely with helix not providing the language servers itself, but allowing you to bring your own.

That’s the thing: I do feel vscode being slow. On my work machine, it’s fine - it takes about two seconds to open a project from start. But on my older laptop, that’s a solid 10 sec before I can start editing.

How do you debug?

Haha, I know that feeling from earlier when I was trying out hx --tutor. Just staring a the keyboard trying to remember which key to press, only to press the wrong one and have it do something completely unexpected.

Have you tried ed?