The birth of the postmodern text editor Helix

Not long ago, "the strongest IDE in the universe" Visual Studio will release 64-bit versions and Sublime Text 4 released the first stable version of news has attracted a lot of attention. However, Visual Studio has been born for more than 20 years, and Sublime Text was born in 2008... Although programmers have many choices in IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and text editors, how long have you not seen a new editor?

Recently, a very popular project appeared on GitHub-the postmodern text editor Helix. Some netizens said: Its appearance not only means the editor itself, but also the ecosystem and scalability. In this saturated space, it's great to see new things emerge. It's like LightTable coming out again, except that Helix is more successful.

Why is it called a "postmodern" editor

Helix is an editor written in Rust, inspired by kakoune/neovim. The project author stated that Helix is largely based on kakoune, and during the development process he found that he agreed with most of kakoune's designs.

If you are curious why it is called a "post-modern" editor, the project author also gave an "official" explanation:

This is a joke. If neovim is a modern version of vim, then Helix is a postmodern version.

Main features

The Helix editor has the following main features:

Multiple selections

The overall design of the Helix editor revolves around using multiple choices as editing primitives, and a single cursor is only a subset of it.

Realize syntax highlighting and code editing through tree-sitter

The tree-sitter parses the code into a syntax tree, so that users can learn more about the code structure. We can use this to track local variables, calculate indentation, and manipulate choices to select syntax nodes.

The parsing process is progressive and fast enough to run every keystroke. And it is robust enough to even output results with grammatical errors.

Built-in language server support

• Context-aware completion
• Documentation
• diagnosis
• Code actions

in the terminal

Its basic implementation uses the terminal front end, and is well connected with tmux or uses ssh.

The project author stated that they are exploring other front ends (wgpu-rs, skia/skulpin based rendering).

with Rust, without Electron, VimScript and JavaScript

Save power consumption.

how to install

The project provides packages of different distributions, and also provides a way to quickly build from source.

git clone --recurse-submodules --shallow-submodules -j8 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix
cd helix
cargo install --path helix-term

Arch Linux

You can also get two packages from AUR:

• helix-bin: Contains pre-built binary packages from GitHub releases
• helix-git: build master branch

Interested students can click on the project address to try it out.

• GitHub project address: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix
• Website: https://helix-editor.com/
• Document: https://docs.helix-editor.com/install.html

Reference link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27358479