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What’s the selling point of helix then?

Personally I have one hell of a config, but since you’re fine with vscode defaults, the only thing I’ve really done to vim that counts was cloning ale into a specific vimfiles directory. What was your package set?



The selling point is that it's a solid editor with zero config I can use in the terminal for those "in between" tasks where it's not really worth pulling it up in an IDE but worth having some syntax highlighting and LSP support. Think like, I need to make a quick change to a python script in some far flung directory. In/out in less than a minute.

Just the fact that you're asking what my package set was is a turnoff for me. There shouldn't be a package set. It should just work. In VS Code when I need the editor to have additional features I just click the button, pick the extension with the highest number of installs, and 99% of the time it immediately does what I want. In vim you play this whole game where you google for it, gather opinions on the "best" plugin for that task, read the README, "just simply add these lines to your lua config", figure out why the keybind is conflicting with your existing keybind setup, etc etc. Goodbye afternoon!

I've tried lunarvim, astrovim, etc etc. Those work great! Until you actually do want to change something. Now you're back in config hell, and even worse, because you didn't even design this hell yourself, it's someone else's hell.


I agree with you, it would be nice to have a cloud profile, a plugin store, few other “windowing” features.

But by package set I literally mean it, e.g. mine is ale, nerdtree, snipmate, and the rest is cosmetic: scss syntax, tab guides and a couple of other syntaxes. Not some lunar/astro nvim-based heap of packages.

What I really miss in vscode and others, be it zeroconf or not, is editor programming features. E.g. I like to have sections in code that I can easily navigate. Something nmap ; /\/\/<Space>sec_<CR>$ does that. I also can create a popup with all of them + function names grepped from an unsaved source and navigate. Or highlight few more tokens. That is impossible in vscode unless you take a deep dive into its or its modules not very well documented internals. You can’t even write a module in .vscoderc, it must be formed into a package and [re]installed or get run in a special vscode mode. If the store doesn’t have what I want, I’m out of luck.

Things that failed (various degrees) for me: correct linewise indentation, readable sections on outline or minimap, non-syntactic folds, custom command mappings. Also the defaults are horrible, my last attempt was something like three pages of settings.json. Way too many afternoons, deleted my whole account to never try again. Tbf, my vimrc is also two pages long in the part that is related to settings. But at least the rest does what I want.




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