the problem with neovim. #

the first time i saw helix, i was very excited to try it out, because i was so sick and tired of the nvim configuring process. i use neovim, but i never enjoyed configuring it.

it always breaks, everything changes from time to time, there’s a lot to do to just get the most basic stuff working.

and there’s a hundred package managers: vim-plug, lazy, this, that.
and even expected stuff requires plugins: autopairs, tree, comments, indent lines, errors, file pickers etc.

you know things are bad when yazi’s file previewer has good syntax highlighting out of the box when compared to nvim.

and let’s not forget the elephant in the room: LSP and autocompletion. idk bro, having to watch youtube videos on how to configure LSP is the most frustrating thing ever. some guy uses lsp-zero, some guy uses mason, i really don’t know what any of this does, to be honest. tbh i never managed to get lsp and completion working at all.

i stopped my config at 212 lines and went back to regular nvim.
meanwhile there are others who cling onto their mini-sized linux kernel level nvim configuration.

i occasionally cycle through vscodium, lite-xl, lapce, zed, kate, sublime and i dunno, nothing just feels right.

and i would try helix too, but since helix had kakoune-style keybinds, i could never switch to it.

until i learnt of evil-helix .

evil helix. #

install evil-helix-bin from the AUR, and you’re good to go.

everything just works out of the box: LSP, syntax highlighting, themes, autocompletion, diagnostics, autopairs, file pickers, comments, indent guides, file pickers, leap.nvim style jump thingy, git stuff (tracking unsaved changes and stuff like that) etc.

it’s pretty cool that i don’t have to do set j gj and set k gk to enable visual line traversal. it’s on by default. this is one of their sane defaults.

it’s been great so far.

my config is available at https://github.com/theophinetheodore/evil-helix-config . i have added some keybinds to make it more similar to nvim, cause muscle memory too strong. other than that, absolutely no problems.