Helix does not aim to be a better vim / neovim. Thus, for example, there are officially no vim bindings and Helix follows the selection → action model. Helix is also a relatively new project.
Helix does not aim to be a better vim / neovim. Thus, for example, there are officially no vim bindings and Helix follows the selection → action model. Helix is also a relatively new project.
There are many cases I actually prefer the quickfix list to an interactive picker:
:Cfilter
to filter things matched in the quickfix list and:colder
/:cnewer
to navigate the history of the quickfix list without having to rerun the command:cdo norm gcc
to comment the matched lines (with the vim-commentary plugin), run a macro with:cdo norm @q
, or:cdo yank A
to put all the matched lines in thea
register for example. You can also do stuff like:cdo -10,+10g/re/p
to print all lines matching some regular expressionre
within the range of 10 lines before to 10 lines after the match.:Git diftool
to get diffs. Vim also has support for parsing the output of many compilers and linting tools so you can use e.g.:compiler cargo
followed by:make
to build the current project with cargo and get any build errors in the quickfix list.In short, interactive pickers are better for browsing, but the quickfix list is better for scipting and holding on to data for longer without having to rerun commands, and can with some basic scripting be used for more things.
Afaik helix doesn’t have diff capabilities which is also a major thing missing from my git workflow.
I expect some of these things to make it into helix eventually, particularly git stuff, but I would be surprised if they add support for more weird janky vim stuff like the quickfix list and ex commands, which is a valid design decision, but they are also very useful tools once you get your head around them.