Started a soft fork, please join!

[yerlaser]

Hi Everyone,

In an attempt to kickstart some further development and to salvage our beloved Helix Editor I have just created a fork with an organization.
I'd like to invite everyone and especially committers to participate.

https://github.com/Helix-Unstable/helix-unstable

The goals and the principles of the fork are the following:

1. Ensure further development of the editor while the current maintainers don't have time to continue with it.
2. Always rebase against Helix proper so that it will always be easily diffed and possibly (partially) squashed back to the proper Helix when it reactivates.
3. Maintain an unstable version similar to Debian Unstable with some PRs included that are stalled or rejected.

There's no intention to create another editor nor benefit from this fork in any way.
So, there will be no donations/bounties (please instead consider donating to the Helix maintainers).

I'm aware how hard it is to maintain even a fork.
Therefore, I'd like to make the project such as to require minimal work possible to maintain it.

Also, I'm not intending to keep ownership of this fork and the organization to myself.
I'll be more than happy to share/transfer the ownership with people who can promise more dedication.

The reason why I'm doing this is to simply switch from talking to doing.
The more we wait, the more users and contributors will leave the editor and so it will be harder to save it.

P.S. As a starting point I've put my personal fork with a couple of PRs included that I found useful for myself.

[anshiq]

Oops, I came across this discussion a little late, I also forked the repository and copied all the PRs to my fork: https://github.com/anshiq/helix

In my free time, I’ll work on merging them. I’m keeping this fork to myself for now, although the people who originally opened the PRs are welcome to participate.

If everything goes well, I may raise a PR for helix-unstable as well, if you think that would be appropriate.

I also wanted to ask: are you keeping track of the PRs that have already been opened in official helix, or are you planning to start from a new point and focus only on new issues and PRs raised on helix unstable mirror?

[anshiq]

Also I need suggestion, Should I directly Raise PR from contributor's branch on my fork or make copy of It for my own fork like I am doing right now...?

[yerlaser]

The more forks, the merrier :)

But, on a more serious note, I don't think copying of all PRs is practical.
Devs of many of them probably abandoned them anyway.

My intention was for a much leaner fork with only a selection of useful PRs merged.

I was thinking of having a group of maintainers who would vote periodically and select PRs to be reviewed and merged.
The best would be to convince the original author to add another upstream and merge to unstable, but if not, then the one who needs the PR must takeover this task.

[0hirume]

can we get a list of all the prs merged?

[yerlaser]

Sure, I'll prepare it in my fork.

[yerlaser]

Here's the list of PRs included so far: https://github.com/Helix-Unstable/helix-unstable/blob/unstable/README_FORK.md

[0hirume]

do u have plans to merge bigger ones such as file watching, steel plugins, etc

[yerlaser]

The steel plugin system is definitely out of bounds for me, the PR is simply enourmous.
Only if matt himself chimes in.

For the others, yes, I'm open for suggestions, but would also like people to join the orga so we could review/merge PRs in a collaborative manner.

[sdcuyahoga]

Thank you so much for doing this!

[ghuh]

It's worth noting that this fork has merged a bunch of PRs and seems to be actively maintained

[yerlaser]

Cool.
If that forks succeeds and builds a community around it I'll be very happy.

My goal is slightly different though.
Ideally I'd like to maintain the fork only to keep the original Helix afloat until the maintainers come back from their busy schedules.
They know the code base more than anyone else and they are more likely to keep it solid.

[nikaro]

And here is another fork i found on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HelixEditor/comments/1wpt22a/mitos_personal_helix_fork_with_bunch_new_features/

[matuusu]

this is Mitos fork:
github
web page

[nikaro]

So far i am happy with it. Thank you for it :-)

How do you envision its maintainership at the long term? As a solo or community project ?

[gravures]

I saw your post last week as I was looking for some maintained helix forks. I was not fully satisfied with my findings.
I've already had a fork of helix for a submitted PR I did a while. So I decided to use it to setup a custom helix version for my daily usage (instead of patching helix on my machine as usual). You could show this version here, I borrowed your idea of unstable release.
It's nice that you setup this specific GitHub helix-unstable account. I do not care about maintaining my own helix fork, it actually only exists to fit my needs. If someone has some ideas on how to share our efforts, I will be pleased to discuss on this.

[yerlaser]

Yes, I have an idea, still thinking, perhaps will write it here or elsewhere