this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
109 points (99.1% liked)

Programming

18142 readers
309 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe@programming.dev
Ategon@programming.dev
MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz
109
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
135 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Hawk@lemmynsfw.com 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I left a comment before but I thought I'd address the concerns around modal editing. It's not as hard as it seems, once you wrap your head around hjkl you'll be fine.

Use Lazyvim to get started and install the vim plugin in vscode. Try it qutebrowser too you won't look back honestly.

Consider helix too, it works out of the box but the keys are slightly different to Vim which makes it challenging for me.

[–] verstra@programming.dev 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I've tried helix and used it for work today. At first, it was super slow, relearning how to jump between buffers, but at the end of the day, i got decent at it.

But I cannot hjkl. It's just unnatural. The moment I stop thinking about it, my hand is back at arrow keys.

[–] Zykino@programming.dev 2 points 2 hours ago

I'm using helix with arrows. On a standard layout its not so great, but on my main keyboard I have a layer with arrow keys near hjkl. So I can use that on all software even on my BÉPO (DVORAC like) layout.