I used it for close to a year and abandoned it because I kept running into issues with tabs getting randomly reloaded and extensions causing trouble.
What would you say has changed over the past few months?
I just felt like Kagi wasn't prioritizing Orion development enough, being busy with their main Kagi subscription and all.
`hx --tutor` is a life saver though. Did that to quickly catch up on hx keybindings and Claude chips in when I need more efficient things to do certain text editing operations.
I've fallen in love with Helix and now use it for everything. Moved from neovim and VS Code to Helix for the majority of my coding.
For me, after trying the Lazy neovim plugin distro and being a long-time vim user, Helix fills a unique need:
- It's beautiful (lots of attention to detail)
- It's fast (meaning: at no point did I think Helix is slower than it should)
- It's hugely ergonomic (each default keystroke resonates with me and the modal selection is a boon for my brain and productivity)
- It requires almost no configuration out-of-the-box
I can't be bothered to use neovim and configure it, and vim doesn't cut it. I need something in the middle between nvim and VS Code, and that's Helix for me. This might have been different had I been a vimscript wizard, which I'm not.
I don't need Helix to be more modular or UNIXy, I simply need it to keep on the direction they've taken. There's a thriving ecosystem of tools around it, and I can use it with Claude Code (by simply refreshing the buffer when there's a new edit). What else can I ask for?
Helix is a great editor, one of the very best I've ever used. As a result, I started chipping in monthly money to keep the project going.
In terms of future improvements, the only one I'm missing the most is the ability to render images or math formulas from the editor, which I hope can at some point be done through a plugin using Kitty's terminal protocol or sixel. This is especially handy when working on Markdown files for notes or blog posts.
So, I kind of agree with you, but that’s still a lot of dependencies baked into the editor. It’s probably not as bad as Neovim+plugins, but it’s still a supply chain issue.
it's 317 unique crates, some of which are internal
305 with helix- removed
258 with gix removed (git stuff in multiple packages from a single upstream group)
240 with windows api wrappers removed.
170 if you remove all subprojects (split on -/_ taking first field, then uniq).
what's left?
fast math and various hashes
backtrace utils
various build utils
some allocators, zero copy facilities, mmap and structures like lrus
time and date handling
character maps / internationalization
concurrency libraries (futures, runtime, etc)
cross platform path & directory helpers
support for general unix platforms, for redox, for linux, for windows
logging infrastructure
some compression libraries
markdown
various testing helpers
rope string representation
shell lexer and utils
terminal interaction models
toml
wasm & wasi
compared to neovim, which is hard to determine because c & cmake toolchains are a bit of a shitshow to figure out, but lets take a look at maybe debian, that says 34 package dependencies downstream. The list is clearly missing a bunch of the toolchain, has limited portability and so on, but certainly shorter at 34 - for a single platform. Note also that neovim bundles several dependencies (e.g. markdown and so on - so they're "hidden" (almost surprising debian hasn't done their usual trick of insisting this isn't hidden))
so where's the rest? well the rest is in the project: tokei says helix contains 132kloc. tokei says neovim contains 984kloc.
so round a little and you get: helix has an order of magnitude more dependencies, but also an order of magnitude less code than neovim.
while I'm sympathetic to concerns around dependency bloat, particularly with an eye to the js ecosystem and supply chain security, it's important to look through the right lens - when the functionality is fairly closely equivalent (there are differences, helix has a lot more modern features, vim has a lot more traditional text manipulation and unixy integration features), and there's an order of magnitude tradeoff in both directions - this is likely demonstration of fairly effective code sharing in helix.
there are important supply chain safety techniques required when using a wide number of disparately owned dependencies. there are also important supply chain safety techniques required when managing a wide number of disparately owned sub-directories of a larger project. there could just as well be a needle in neovims vimscript haystack as there is in helix dependency stack, i can tell you now though, as i'm familiar with almost all of helix dependencies i've put eyes over their code at least once, there's almost certainly been more eyes on helix deps recently than on neovims vimscript - though eye's passing over don't always catch things either of course.
But once helix adds plugins it will be exactly the same because those tens of VSCode plugins provide functionality not present in helix, so will be similarly implemented externally
That would've been the wasm plugin route, which was rejected in favor of this great emacs feature of using an obscure language, so sandbox are unlikely
I enjoy helix but don’t write nvim off entirely. I’m not much of a lua dev but llms have proven themselves to be excellent when writing and modifying nvim configs.
IMO that was the biggest motivator to switch was helix’s well put together lsp/lint config.
This is great. We definitely need something like this.
Where are the safe levels limits to interpret test results? This would be a small addition that would make any of the results interpretable. I had to open the PlasticList website to get the baseline safe thresholds for each chemical and to do some rough approximations.
Not always. People from the center and west side of Spain typically refer to it as "español" rather than "castellano". Nonetheless, it's true educated people typically refer to it as "castellano" as well as other Spaniards that live in a region where other official languages are spoken.
And some of the people I was thinking of who said "castellano" were from Latin America (though this is clearly a minority usage there; maybe some of those people even had Catalan-speaking friends or colleagues or something).
Regardless of how they might feel, they're still Spanish (hold a Spanish passport), so it's a true fact. I also take issue with you claiming that all Catalans feel this way, that's largely untrue.
That being said, both terms "Castilian Spanish" and "Catalan Spanish" sound weird to me. Source: I'm both a Catalan and Spanish speaker. In my languages, they're both referred as "Castellano" o "Catalan".
I'd appreciate that people referred to these languages either as Catalan or Spanish, no need for unnecessary qualifiers. (Spanish is, unlike English, a completely centralized language. No need to make geographical distinctions.)
> Spanish is, unlike English, a completely centralized language. No need to make geographical distinctions.
So you'd say there are no distinctions worth noting between the Spanish spoken in any Spanish-speaking Latin American country and the Spanish spoken in Spain?
I'd say that, for example, there are significant enough pronunciation (and in a few cases, vocabulary) differences between Portuguese in Portugal vs Brazil.
From experience, learning one is not the same as the other.
So there are definitely contexts where these differences matter.
Hear, hear. This theory also explains why other languages such as Scala were never really mainstream despite allowing Java- and Kotlin- style programming and having a much broader follower base in Europe. Lack of outreach, concerted marketing, and advocacy from American companies that have always dominated the narrative.
His Youtube videos are gold. This one, in which he aims to take the imprecision of floating point numbers to extreme applications, such as training neural networks with linear activation functions or even implementing cryptologically-safe functions, is superb.
What would you say has changed over the past few months? I just felt like Kagi wasn't prioritizing Orion development enough, being busy with their main Kagi subscription and all.
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