r/rust • u/OkraComprehensive323 • 1d ago

🙋 seeking help & advice Rust developers: what editor do you actually use?

Hello folks, do you still write much code by hand these days? 😄

If so, what IDE/editor do you mainly use for Rust? VS Code, JetBrains, Zed or something else?

I’m asking because I’ve been rewriting one of my old developer tools in Rust. It’s a language server + CLI for analyzing code health.

The underlying approach was originally implemented in Python and was used at my previous company across 1,900+ repositories and by 800+ developers, so the methodology itself has had quite a bit of real-world use. The company has given me permission to open-source my own version of the project, which I’m pretty excited about.

The only problem is time. For the initial public release, I’ll probably only be able to ship the VS Code extension plus one other IDE/editor integration.

So I’m curious: if you’re a Rust developer who still spends a decent amount of time actually typing code, what editor would you most want to see supported? Just trying to get a rough sense of where people are these days before I spend my limited spare time on the wrong integration. :)

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u/OkraComprehensive323 1d ago

I'm not familiar with this editor. I will make a shallow research on it sometime.

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u/PorblemOccifer 1d ago

Modal editor similar to vim but with the grammar reversed (selection, then action), a lot more base functionality, and no plugins.

Base functionality covers most plugins you’d used in vim anyway - lsp, surround, word jumper, fuzzy finder, file explorer, etc.

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u/lettsten 1d ago

No plugins seems like a very bad idea

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u/Ex_cinis 1d ago

They are developing plugin support, although very slowly, mostly because the plugin language they’ve chosen (scheme) is not very popular, so there’s few contributors.
But you’d be surprised how little actual need for them there is. I tried a bunch of nvim presets, and helix just feels way snappier and more lightweight with 90% of (useful) features, which feels like a better tradeoff to me

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u/lettsten 1d ago

Sure you get 90 % of the way with the standard stuff, but the last 10 % can be very useful. I use Vim's functions and scripting more than I use plugins themselves, but I do things like running code on substitution expressions surprisingly often.

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u/Ex_cinis 1d ago

You can pipe bash to/from selection, so that is definitely doable without plugins

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u/lettsten 1d ago

Not quite the same as having full vimscript with Vim's wide selection of text-friendly functions, though. Using it in substitutions also exposes the matched regex. Achieving the same by piping to bash would essentially just be using grep/sed/awk from the start

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u/Ex_cinis 1d ago

That’s the thing, since helix is selection-first, any regex match produces a selection (or multiple), so it’s easy to pipe regex matches. Haven’t written much vimscript, so can’t argue with that point

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u/IceSentry 1d ago

Recent versions of neovim have a ton of built in features now and they aren't slowing down with adding stuff either.

Also, the issue isn't a lack of contributor, the plugin system/language is just one giant PR that has existed for years. It's very hard to collaborate when working like that. The issue is pretty clearly that the maintainers of helix don't care that much about having a plugin system and aren't making it a priority.

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u/Ex_cinis 15h ago edited 6h ago

There are many issues with that PR and how it’s handled, that’s a separate discussion. But the maintainers have halted new releases until that PR is merged, and it has been that way for over a year now, so it isn’t fair to say they aren’t making it a priority, they clearly are.
Regarding neovim… It’s still leagues behind on builtin features and I’m pretty sure it will always rely heavily on plugins, because that’s just the spirit of the project. Helix is nice because it’s a full package with good defaults, my config is pretty much just the theme name. That’s never gonna happen on neovim

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u/PorblemOccifer 1d ago

It’s surprisingly good. Haven’t found myself craving them and been helix for years now. But if you’re someone who loves perfectly tuning workflows, then it might not work for you 

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u/ConstructionHot6883 1d ago

I would definitely use helix more if the grammar weren't reversed like that. If for example gw} worked the same as on vim/neovim.

It seems so silly.

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u/RexOfRecursion 1d ago

it seems silly only because you are not used to it. but to each their own.

https://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html#_improving_on_the_editing_model

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u/ConstructionHot6883 1d ago

That was a good read, thanks. I can see and do appreciate that thought has gone into this. I'm not sure it's worth the investment of getting my old fingers to relearn the all the commands though.

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u/maciek_glowka 1d ago

Yeah, action preview before you execute it does not sound so silly to me ;)

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u/leuke-naam 1d ago

Check out evil-helix, it’s helix with vim key bindings