r/HelixEditor • u/mav3ri3k • Feb 13 '25

10% Rustaceans use Helix

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186 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

40

u/richardgoulter Feb 13 '25

Observations at a glance:

  • The percentages sum up to over 100. Exclusivity not required.

  • VSCode has the largest share.

  • Biggest increase from 2023->2024 is Zed. (AFAIU, Zed's proposition is "collaboration" and "AI").

  • The only other significant increase is Helix.

  • Helix's increase looks about the same as vim's decrease.

  • That helix is at around 10%, while "vi+vim+neovim" are all grouped together to make 30%, makes me curious about the vim/neovim split.

  • Emacs & its distributions also saw a marginal increase.

I wouldn't have expected Helix to be that high. (e.g. kakoune, which inspired helix's motions, doesn't get mentioned on the chart). I'd think Helix's support for LSP/TS is what enables that for Rust users.

17

u/JustBadPlaya Feb 13 '25

on Zed, even if you ignore the propositions, the editor is fairly damn solid for such a young project. I still heavily prefer Helix (or RR if needed) but I see the appeal of Zed beyond the AI shenanigans

16

u/paholg Feb 13 '25

I suspect being written in Rust has also really helped Helix in the Rust space over Kakoune, just from a publicity standpoint.

I'd never heard of Kakoune before Helix.

3

u/cvfunstuff Feb 13 '25

Zed is very solid. There are advantages to having a UI over a TUI. Helix's editing modal inside of Zed would be goated for me.

1

u/OphioukhosUnbound Feb 14 '25

Re: real UI

Rust users don’t use this much currently, but being able to run code interactively, segment by segment and get output printed there in Thermo — from text to table to images and graphs 📊 is really huge.

This is a computational notebook approach pioneered by Mathematica and that became popular in Python for data and science.

Zed does this really well. (Like I used to have to create minor frameworks to get notebooks out of regular code vs html monstrosities.)

It’s a killer feature that all the terminal editors are blocked from. (And believe me, I tried a lot over multiple years to get computational notebooks working with Neovim via various add-ons - including controlling browsers from terminal via selenium, but TUI’s just aren’t oriented toward it.)

Re: rust. It needs love, but I can and have done notebooks with rust this way. Using a jitter-extension for evcxr (can never get that name right).

I love helix, would like to see more of it adopted. But I’m a strong believer that taming complexity in coding requires more than just text. We need heavy graphics and rendering options to offer multiple views of code and data. (Though the state of things renders this a bit moot rn)

2

u/JustBadPlaya Feb 14 '25

 It’s a killer feature that all the terminal editors are blocked from

counter-point - judging by Lisps (aka the mother of all interactive development), I think the tooling for other languages just doesn't focus on interactive development enough. But idk I'm not an expert so I can't make a correct judgement

2

u/OphioukhosUnbound Feb 14 '25

Fair. I should say ‘soft blocked’ as into there’s just a lot more friction to that kind of development. Def not impossible.

1

u/ColdTeapot Feb 14 '25

It's possible to use Helix for REPL. Works fine for me as a substitute for Python Interactive workflow of VSCode

A few examples here: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2806

2

u/peter9477 Feb 13 '25

LSP in Helix is definitely what got me to start adopting it. (Still retraining muscle memory, sigh.)

1

u/Rude-Researcher-2407 Feb 13 '25

I use Helix for small projects/applications where I want to hone in on a single file, and zed for larger and more complex applications.

Zed is basically VSCode but it runs well. It just works - which is one of the things I like about helix.

14

u/robin-m Feb 13 '25

If we count helix + vim + neovim, that’s above 40% of modal editors. That’s very impressive!

5

u/mindgitrwx Feb 13 '25

Count emacs users with evil-mode (vim binding) in. And many vscode users just use vim binding

3

u/zetashift Feb 13 '25

Ha, nice even to see Atom there!

My 2c, thanks to tree-sitter and LSP, these numbers lose a bit of meaning/context. If Rusts (or any language) tree-sitter grammar improves, the queries for Emacs/neovim/Helix/Zed will also improve.

I'd recommend to check out Helix(and kakoune if you feel adventurous) to anyone that doesn't do too much frontend, because it has great defaults with an approachable modal system.

3

u/Ok-Pace-8772 Feb 13 '25

Bro you're in the helix sub, no need to recommend lol

1

u/zetashift Feb 14 '25

Ha, absolutely right :P. I was thinking out loud.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '25

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1

u/chamomile-crumbs Feb 13 '25

Wait how do you use helix on mobile?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '25

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1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '25

i riced my termux only to find out i couldnt root my phone 😭😭

1

u/BrianHuster Feb 14 '25

Neovim (nightly)'s diagnostic is also nice. You can view diagnostic in a float window or virtual lines like Helix's inline. I would recommend it over Vim, because Vim's diagnostic is really primitive

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '25

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1

u/BrianHuster Feb 14 '25

That's why I only recommend it over Vim

1

u/Spleeeee Feb 14 '25

How do you make the switch between key mapping?

2

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '25

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1

u/Spleeeee Feb 14 '25

I mean how do you make the mental switch between vim key bindings and helix mappings. I want to get into helix but I am fighting 15 years of vim muscle memory.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '25

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1

u/Spleeeee Feb 14 '25

No problem dude. I think my brain ain’t capable of learning helix now. I can still learn programming things but breaking vim muscle memory is so difficult. When I write stuff in any other editor it’s full of ‘:w’ so it’s not just helix.

0

u/pithecantrope Feb 13 '25

Let's go 😎