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The Helix Text Editor (2024)

I’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things. I use Rust, despite never having had a professional reason to use it in my life. I switched to Linux in my student years and I’ve never looked back since, even though it constantly breaks and I can’t get my Bluetooth headphones to connect. I have a split keyboard with home row mods set up because I read some random blog posts and it looked cool to me. I literally learned to program because I figured I should learn how to do more nerd stuff.

This adds some complexity (you now need to juggle different modes of editing), but also makes it easier to use powerful text manipulation commands in a consistent way. The idea is that someone can create a tool that knows how to parse projects written in a given language, how to find suggestions, how to handle go-to-definition, and so on, and provides that information via a predefined protocol. Defenders of the terminal often argue that the limitations of the environment allow you to have more control over your tools — you can script and configure and put things together to build the system you want.

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