abandoning helix editor

[hantzuo]

It’s a shame because Helix is great, but development has been frustratingly slow. It’s been nearly a year without a release, a roadmap, or any new features. It feels like the project is stalling out, so I’m moving to Neovim. The constant updates and 'mastodon' ecosystem are just too good to pass up just for a prommise without soul like helix.

[jmkraus]

Maybe I’m old, but I’m quite happy that Helix doesn’t come around with the latest hype every other week. It does what I need, and it serves me well. YMMV

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[warmwaffles]

I'm missing some features like

• jumplist management
• aliasing things better like :W to just write because my fat fingers can't get off the shift key fast enough
• scripting support
• code folding, I've had the need to hide giant sections of code because I am working on a section of code that I am tired of having to jump back and forth with.

[hantzuo]

You're right Helix is rock solid. My only real pain point is the inability to fold or style comments beyond simple colors. When documenting libraries on a vertical setup, those examples and docs take up the whole screen, which is tough for productivity.

I’d love to help, but it seems everyone is focused on AI lately, leaving traditional OSS projects with low morale and little sponsorship. We can't expect one person to do everything. I really appreciate the author’s work...they’ve built something great and lovable. I’ll definitely be back for the next release. Helix is still the best editor I’ve used, it just needs a few more 'large project' features to fit my current workflow.

[hantzuo]

How can we sponsor maintainers who have the bandwidth to help? If we really value the project, why not organize and crowdfund it ourselves montlhy? Even small contributions from everyone would add up.

[ohuu]

Got to admit I've been wondering whether Helix is a dead project over the last few months. It's always been slow to release and I'm okay with that. One of the reasons I left neovim was that it kept breaking every few months. Helix is very reliable, but in the last few months it honestly feels like the project has died. I hope I'm wrong!

[sicher]

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/commits/master/

[ohuu]

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/releases

[Fryboyter]

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/releases

In my opinion, you can’t tell whether a project is actually dead just by looking at the release schedule. If I’m not mistaken, Helix was originally planned to have only two releases per year anyway. Which is hardly much at all. Personally, I’d prefer something like nightly builds, at the very least. Or simply more official releases.

However, I also have to say that it’s actually quite easy to compile Helix from the current source code. I’ve been building new versions myself for quite some time now using the Git code.

[jmkraus]

Of course I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, but imho the commits in the main branch are the usual library updates, bug fixes, and small improvements. Which are totally welcome, of course. But there are no indications which direction the Helix editor is heading to. This seems to happen behind the curtain, and that’s what probably most people are eager to know.

[hantzuo]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I see two main issues here:

1. The maintainer bottleneck: I think trying to build Helix as a fully integrated "island" creates an unsustainable workload for the core team. Look at vim, its massive value comes from a community-driven plugin ecosystem, not just a few core developers, vim without plugins its just a raw text editor. If Helix had an open plugin system, the core wouldn't risk stalling for years between releases because enthusiasts could build and maintain features independently.

2. The modern open source reality: Helix is trying to scale in the AI era, where community dynamics have shifted. Attention spans are different now, and developer energy often goes to social media rather than deep, long-term open-source contributions. If Linux were started today under these cultural conditions, it might not have made it. We are in the economy of attention.

Finally, as it stands, currently Helix is a solid editor for DevOps or lighter work, but for large-scale development, the closed architecture and reviewer bottleneck keep it years behind options like LazyVim. Anyway the first "brick" is there.

[babucarr32]

Honestly, recently I started feeling like this project is dying slowly. I hope it does not. I really like this editor. We need major releases like

Plugins
Code Folding
Icons
Goto Hover
textDocument/inlineCompletion
File explorer and tree helper
Inline Git Blame
and more...

Thank you maintainers for your great efforts. Without you this project might not make it this far, your work is loved and appreciated.

[Fryboyter]

Who are “we”?

Of the things mentioned, code folding would be nice to have, but it’s not absolutely necessary for me. I don’t care about the other features.

That’s why I always think it’s problematic when one person tries to speak for others.

Regardless, over 80 commits have been made this month alone. So I don't really see any signs of a slow death. Especially since I suspect it's very likely that Helix is being developed by programmers in their spare time.

[anshiq]

I think, if maintainers are not doing helix as full time, They are doing a good job(looking at changes done by maintainers daily basis)

[tassiovirginio]

I'm considering the Helix rolling release, I'm using the master branch version.

[warmwaffles]

master is fairly stable. I compile it once or twice a week to run locally. I haven't run into major issues doing this.

[jpeeler]

This issue seems to be the most up to date I've found for gathering the maintainer's release readiness perspective (spoiler: it's not a direct answer): #15319. Worth remembering that the developers of Helix have pointed out many times that they do not care about popularity or feeling beholden to really any outside expectations.

Forgive me for the slight tangent, but for development processes you have two differing extremes. One being the bazaar style development of "release early, release often". Then you have the other cathedral type development which is infrequent and is often associated with proprietary software. The latter can be more frustrating to users when source code is not available, but obviously that's not the case here. All that to say, nobody can argue either is more correct - it's a culture decision and depends on what goals the authors are trying to achieve.

I do wonder if the project speed might pick back up to a somewhat more regular cadence once the plugin system is merged. I read somewhere that a release would likely be a prerequisite for plugins merging to give even more time to sort issues with such a major change. But who knows, just speculation on my part.

[warmwaffles]

I've been running off of main for quite a while and haven't had any severe issues.

I do wonder if the project speed might pick back up to a somewhat more regular cadence once the plugin system is merged.

I have lost hope that the plugin system would be merged this year. I hope it does, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

[BenitoEck]

Today it's been exactly one year since the last official release of Helix Editor. Meanwhile, PRs have been merged and bugs have been fixed. And to my understanding, there is a general plan for a new release, which has been discussed roughly since May this year. I hope that we will soon see a new official release that then makes its way into package managers and distributions out there and makes the improvements that have been happening more widely available. I think it would help keep the momentum of this project going. Meanwhile, thanks to everyone involved for this great tool. Using it gives me joy every day.

[dpassen]

I was hoping they were waiting for that one year mark to cut the new release. I'm sure it will happen, sooner than later.

[BenitoEck]

Me too.

[trojkat]

For me, the weird part is that in the age of AI tools that are speeding up the writing of quality code, the development in this project seems to be going slower 🤔

[BenitoEck]

Not to start a trench war over AI usage, but if anything that actually gives me hope. I like how Helix approaches a couple of things. Slower and deliberate development is one of them.

[ronisbr]

Same here. I left Helix a long time ago when I saw that the plugin system would take a lot time to be released.

A lot people here is saying: "Helix is fine as it is," but it is not, unless you have a very specific use case. For example:

1. You do not have a built-in spell check that can check spelling in multiple languages.
2. You cannot align the text (center, right) according to the text width.
3. There is a lot of problems to connect AI tools inside the editor right now.
4. Command customization is somewhat limited.

Etc.

And I noticed we reached a very strange point: there were PRs to solve some of those questions, but no maintainer reviewed, probably thinking that it does not fit the "core". However, without a plugin system, or you add features to the core or you do not have the features at all.

For example, there was a PR to implement the alignment (a simple one). IIRC, after one year without feedback the op gave up Helix development and closed it.

[jmkraus]

I get your point. The question is: was Helix ever intended to be an ‘all-purpose editor’, or do its maintainers believe that the editor is already fully developed as a programming tool and that anything beyond that is simply a nuisance?

[ronisbr]

This is a good question and the maintainers should address that clearly. It is not good to take your time to make a PR, trying to contribute to an open source project, that will never be accepted.

[BenitoEck]

I see it as a design choice that fits some users and use cases and some not. For instance my nvim config was over 1k lines when I realised that I now longer understand enough of it and that I required a ton of plugins to do it what I wanted. Helix had most of what I needed build in and the default key-map worked for me. There was nothing to maintain for me as a user. Everything I really wanted worked out of the box. Well, that's obviously true for me personally, not necessarily for every one. So, I'm not waiting for the plug-in system to shape Helix into an IDE that I need to maintain on a per plugin basis. I'm waiting more for some maintenance releases that occasionally add some useful niceties.

[hantzuo]

I see it as a design choice that fits some users and use cases and some not. For instance my nvim config was over 1k lines when I realised that I now longer understand enough of it and that I required a ton of plugins to do it what I wanted. Helix had most of what I needed build in and the default key-map worked for me. There was nothing to maintain for me as a user. Everything I really wanted worked out of the box. Well, that's obviously true for me personally, not necessarily for every one. So, I'm not waiting for the plug-in system to shape Helix into an IDE that I need to maintain on a per plugin basis. I'm waiting more for some maintenance releases that occasionally add some useful niceties.

That’s totally fair, but the flip side of the 'batteries-included' approach is that you're locked into the core maintainers' roadmap.

When you hit an edge case or need a niche workflow, Neovim lets you build a clean solution in a few lines of Lua. With Helix, you just have to wait and hope it gets upstreamed. The beauty of distros like LazyVim is that you get Helix's zero-maintenance experience 95% of the time, but you still keep the escape hatch for the other 5%.

That nails the whole 'Helix promise': If Neovim is modern Vim, Helix is post-modern. But its just a prommise not a reallity.

[shepelevstas]

At first i missed code folding too, but it was just a habit/routine. Helix has it's means of navigating code, now i have other habits. What i still miss is: marks in scrollbar like in vscode that show where is what in the document, "saveable" search results that can be a separate tab, reorderable tabs, multicursor paste to complement multicursor copy, folder tree file navigation, general files management like renaming, creating, deleting. Maybe I haven't yet figured out "helix ways" for theses things.
But slow development is one of the best things for "tool" projects. I really like how Elm hasn't change since 2018, it's reliability is outstanding!