The Helix Text Editor (2024)
16 comments
·September 8, 2025eviks
> This has some advantages — for example it means that Helix is very responsive and lightweight, because there’s not a lot of heavy rendering work to be doing.
Which text editor is unresponsive because of heavy rendering?? And that's the only potential benefit the author has identified
MrJohz
Hey, that's me! I wrote this about a year ago, and I'm still using Helix, and still quite happy with it. The lack of a plugin ecosystem is sometimes irritating, but work there is slowly progressing. And I'm still not a fan of the idea of building the perfect IDE by composing different TUIs together and spending hours trying to get a perfect setup. But other than that, editing in Helix feels so fluent and fast that I'd really struggle not to use it if I went back.
srid
Is Helix good for Markdown-based note taking workflows? I suppose no, because plugin system is yet unavailable.
gidellav
Hi! I started using Helix about 1 month ago, jumped from Emacs, and I have to say that I really prefer this minimalist approach where I have just two tabs on my term emulator, one for Helix one for git/compiler/etc, and I honestly don't feel the absence of plugins, except for maybe a better find/replace symbols like in VSCode could be nice.
Well, thanks for your article!
josh-sematic
Regarding open files, <space>+b opens up a picker for the files in the buffer.
There is also now a file explorer under <space>+e (little e for starting at workspace root, capital E for starting in the buffer’s directory).
MrJohz
I've not actually used the file explorer much, but I've seen that it's there. I assume it can't do file moves or deletes, though? That's the one thing I really miss from file pickers in other tools, otherwise I find the fuzzy search approach really convenient.
I should definitely use the buffer picker more, at the moment I use the gn/gb commands and it mostly works, but then I suddenly end up with too many open buffers and it's hard to figure out where I need to go again.
1-more
Home row layer select is extremely my thing too!
skylurk
Helix is great! All of the features I wish vim had out of the box, and fast.
It would be cool if it got more token-based movement/selection/replacement features, since it already has good tree-sitter integration.
f311a
Too bad the development of helix is pretty slow and core devs are pretty resistant to various of changes.
It would be benefit a lot from some funding, but it's hard to find funding for a TUI editor.
It insane how fast Zed is moving in terms of development, on the other hand, I'm still waiting for some features in helix for more than 2 years. Helix devs have their own vision and reject a lot of attempts/PRs to make it better.
barnabee
What important features are missing?
While I’m looking forward to the plugin system for a few nice to have tweaks, and amrunning the dev branch alongside the main build to check it out, there’s nothing really essential missing to me.
I appreciate that the maintainers aren’t trying to compete with vim or emacs for features or be all things to all people, aren’t that they don’t prioritise growing the number of users over keeping true to their vision for the editor.
Helix is all the better for its slow, considered development as far as I’m concerned.
unshavedyak
> Helix devs have their own vision and reject a lot of attempts/PRs to make it better.
I feel your pain, but i support their focus here. Not only does it help prevent feature soup but at the end of the day they're the ones that have to support all these things.
As always, anyone is free to fork it. That sounds short but imo true nonetheless. Especially if the feature is small enough that the fork is just maintaining a patch on the head.
Regardless, plugins are being worked on so in time hopefully it's less of an issue.
> It insane how fast Zed is moving in terms of development,
I imagine funding and bodies helps a lot on this front.
mcdow
Switched to Helix about a year ago and haven't looked back since. Has almost everything I need in it(with a few exceptions). With Vim I would've had to have installed some janky plugins.
I really recommend it if you find Vim motions unintuitive and want some of the basic features of IDEs like VSCode.
My biggest gripes: - No plugin system (yet). - Configuration documentation is not the best. - Hasn't reached enough popularity to where other apps have "Helix mode" like how a bunch of apps have "vim mode". I find myself wanting to do Helix motions in other apps.
seanhunter
I am a long-time vim user and tried out helix. In many ways it's great but the fact that there was (at that time) no "reflow text" function made it just completely unusable for me for basic text-editing outside of code.
If that's been added I'd take another look.
MrJohz
Reflow in the sense of wrapping blocks of text? That exists, I think under :reflow, although I always forget the name when I'm looking for it.
ruduhudi
[flagged]
How strange that the article never links directly to the Helix editor. I usually immediately open the homepage of whatever a blog post is talking about as a background tab to be able to click back and forth, or to be able to immediately figure out what the thing being talked about is, but no luck here, except for some decoys (like the "helix" link next to the title which is just the tag "helix" which sends you to a page with all the posts tagged with "helix", which happens to just be this one post).
I of course quickly just googled it myself and found the page, and so afterward I went to the source of the blog post and searched for the URL to confirm that it wasn't actually linked to anywhere. Turns out that about three quarters of the way down, in the "Key Bindings" section, there is a link to the Helix keymappings documentation page, which appears to be the closest thing to a direct homepage link.
Anyways, no nefarious intent being implied of course, I just found it sort of interesting. I am pretty certain it just got accidentally left out, or maybe the project didn't have a homepage back in December of 2024 when this was originally written? Although the github page isn't directly linked either (only one specific issue in the github tracker).
Oh, and here's a link to their page: https://helix-editor.com/
And github page: https://github.com/helix-editor/