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Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

> All I want is ...

Understandable, for sure, but the number of users who want their own "simple" addition means it gets overwhelming pretty quickly. Helix has deferred work on most extra functionality until after implementing a Scheme extension language. Once that's done, adding features might be as simple as installing a plugin.

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Wait, helix will get scheme before gnu emacs, aww

Authors are free to do as they please, but as an entitled member of the peanut gallery…aren’t there already enough small configuration languages? Seems like a distraction when there are already hundreds of schemes, Lua, Janet, etc.

In that case, Kakoune[1] (Helix’s main inspiration) is probably more your jam. You get an RPC interface and are free to script it from anything you want (shell to Rust is about the range I’ve encountered). It does mean that you don’t get the batteries you get with Helix (e.g. LSP support) and need to bring your own (e.g. kakoune-lsp[2]).

[1] https://kakoune.org/

[2] https://github.com/kakoune-lsp/kakoune-lsp

Is including batteries the main reason helix seems to have started taking off, while kakoune hasn't?

I use kakoune, because I like the client/server architecture for managing multiple windows, which helix can't do. The less configuring I do the better, but I've hardly done any in the past year. It's nice to have the option.