It's especially interesting because thanks to Neovim, implementing vim mode should be more or less trivial -- Neovim has a server mode where you send it keystrokes and it sends you back buffer edits and/or UI to display. And since it's real vim you get to keep all your vim config, plugins etc in your IDE. I'm surprised I haven't seen it really take off yet.

I believe Nova added support for vim keybindings recently. We're going to add vim keybindings soon. In fact, we're starting to regret not implementing the functionality for this release!

Helix - or rather Kakoune† - has better-than-Vim keybindings though, in my view. It's what Vim keybindings would be if they were built from the ground up, without decades of cruft and bolted on bits, and instead had a coherent design to them that was easy to make sense of and intuit. Vim has that with its command grammar, a neat way of combining smaller comands into larger ones, but not with the individual command keybindings themselves.

† I'm still not sure what the difference between the two is, except that the Kakoune dev had to take a year-long break because of having a newborn child, and Helix development continued in that time.

I've tried Helix few days ago and was more than impressed – almost everything you want from code editor is there out of the box, and transition from neovim was super fast. The only thing the holds me from switching completely is lack of Copilot.

But yes, there seem to be a momentum of rethinking editors and frustration with popularity of a slow and heavy editors.