I’m continuing to use Helix and I really appreciated this quick overview from Felix Knorr, who provides a few new nice configuration options (including binding the immediate favorite gw command to a single key). I remain really happy with how ready-to-go this editor is without plugins or heavy-duty configuration, while still being discoverable and offering a lot of depth.

This feature of [Helix] is so good! Typing gw replaces the first two characters of words with random letters, and then typing those two letters navigates immediately to that word, selecting it for further operation like copy or replacing. In this example, gwcx would take my cursor straight to the word “register.”

This post from Julia Evans about using Helix was just the bump I needed to check it out, after installing it but never really giving it a try some time ago. I really like how quickly it’s immediately useful without much extra work or time. It will take some adjustment from vim navigation and commands, so perhaps won’t stick, but for now I’m appreciating the intentionality of thinking about what I need to do in the editor, and find so far that I’m picking it up pretty quickly.

For what it’s worth, the only additions I’ve made to Julia’s configuration so far are for some cursor differentiation and one hard-to-break vim convention:

"0" = "goto_line_start"

# from https://docs.helix-editor.com/configuration.html
[editor.cursor-shape]
insert = "bar"
normal = "block"
select = "underline"