Hacker News Reader

Comment by barnabee | Hacker News Reader

What important features are missing?

While I’m looking forward to the plugin system for a few nice to have tweaks, and amrunning the dev branch alongside the main build to check it out, there’s nothing really essential missing to me.

I appreciate that the maintainers aren’t trying to compete with vim or emacs for features or be all things to all people, aren’t that they don’t prioritise growing the number of users over keeping true to their vision for the editor.

Helix is all the better for its slow, considered development as far as I’m concerned.

View on HN

- auto file refresh

- global replace

- multiline search in files

- small terminal with toggle (for quick commands)

- Recent LSP protocol features that would allow using inline copilot suggestions

- better file manager where I can create, remove, rename files

- an ability to bind x and xx (double) keypress at the same time

- git blame

- a better ability to run programs on top of helix (lazygit, for example, the same way people use it in neovim without closing it)

Many of these features are more IDE than editor to me and that perhaps explains our different points of view.

Personally I’d be quite sad if the core Helix editor ends up like a VS Code style IDE, or even like some of the more heavyweight vim/emacs configs I’ve seen. I prefer simple, lightweight tools with relatively narrow focus and for me there’s not a lot in that bucket missing from Helix.

I use panes in my terminal for e.g. quickly running commands and file management, and terminal tabs for e.g. quickly switching to gitui/lazygit or longer terminal and command sessions.

I prefer this because all the pane and tab management, file management tools, etc. are therefore the same whether I’m editing code or doing something else in the terminal.

Of course, once there are plugins, hopefully people who want those things from their editor can be catered for too.

I would like project wide search and replace

helix already has that <space> + "/'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com