Every time I’ve tried helix, as a staunch neovim user, I’ve run up against frustration at the selection-first approach. In helix you have to select the function first, then delete it. In neovim I know that daf will delete the function and the line below it if there is one.

It’s not better or worse IMHO, it’s just different enough that it requires me to go from thinking action-modifier-movement to thinking movement-modifier-action. I’ll probably keep giving it a shot every year or so though, always useful to try tools and see if something fits you better than what you have.

Everything just works out of the box. It’s a pretty massive difference from the world of Vim, where a significant investment to figure out how to customize your editor to your liking is required.

Ok, so the issue I have with this is that “customizing” is not the same as “making it work”. Very often I will have a working environment and I will still spend 30 minutes looking for a color theme that I like. Two completely different things. The benefit of investing significant amount of time to configure something is that while you’re figuring out how to make something work you’re also making it work exactly the way you like it.

That being said, neovim is really hard to configure correctly. I had some many weird issues with LSP recently that I’m definitely open to trying something new like Helix.