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Coders or lemmy, what editors do you use? Is it worth learning a new one? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by verstra@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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When I was in high school I found Sublime Text and learned "multiple cursors". Since then, I've transitioned to vscode, mainly because I need LSP (without too much configuration work) for my work.

I keep hearing about how modal editing is faster and I would like to switch to a more performant editor. I've been looking at helix, as the 4th generation of the vi line of editors. Is anyone using it? Is it any good for the main code editor?

The problem that I have is that learning new editing keybindings would probably take me a month of time, before I get to the same amount of productivity (if I ever get here at all). So I'm looking for advice of people who have already done that before.

My code editing does involve a lot of "ctrl-arrow" to move around words, "ctrl-shift-arrow" to select words, "home/end" to move to beginning/end of the line, "ctrl-d" for "new cursor at next occurrence", "shift-alt-down" for "new cursor in the line below", "ctrl-shift-f" for "format file" and a few more to move around using LSP-provided "declaration"/"usages".

I would have to unlearn all of that.

Also, I do use "ctrl-arrow" to edit this post. Have you changed keybindings in firefox too?

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[–] wazoobi@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago

Well I was mostly looking to learn vim and was trying to use Helix as a way to do that because it looked like vim, but with a commands window that popped up to help learn the commands. They're upfront about making some breaking changes from vim though, and while I may not need to jump into a bunch of different machines that often I do like the flexibility of being able to hop into vi, vim, nvim, or some GUI editors with vim bindings relatively comfortably. So I found that LazyVim was more what I was looking for personally and nearly as easy to work with out of the box.

I am glad to see the project seems to be going strong. That was another minor concern of mine, there's little risk of vim going anywhere, but I remember being excited about the Atom editor a while back and that just kinda faded away. If it passes the test of time I'd be happy to try it again in the future. I figure it would be easier to go from vim -> helix than vice versa.