When I was in high school I found Sublime Text and learned “multiple cursors”. Since then, I’ve transitioned to vscode, mainly because I need LSP (without too much configuration work) for my work.
I keep hearing about how modal editing is faster and I would like to switch to a more performant editor. I’ve been looking at helix, as the 4th generation of the vi line of editors. Is anyone using it? Is it any good for the main code editor?
The problem that I have is that learning new editing keybindings would probably take me a month of time, before I get to the same amount of productivity (if I ever get here at all). So I’m looking for advice of people who have already done that before.
My code editing does involve a lot of “ctrl-arrow” to move around words, “ctrl-shift-arrow” to select words, “home/end” to move to beginning/end of the line, “ctrl-d” for “new cursor at next occurrence”, “shift-alt-down” for “new cursor in the line below”, “ctrl-shift-f” for “format file” and a few more to move around using LSP-provided “declaration”/“usages”.
I would have to unlearn all of that.
Also, I do use “ctrl-arrow” to edit this post. Have you changed keybindings in firefox too?
I’ve used everything, vim, nvim, emacs, visual studio, vscode, sublime, codeblocks, android studio, xcode, bloodshed, intellij, eclipse, VB, geany, dreamweaver, qt, atom, and cursor (even though it’s really just a plugin)
It doesn’t matter. It will never matter. I use vscode today because it handles everything I throw at it and it’s easy to make extensions for. Or cursor if I’m feeling lazy, the agentic mode with claude is pretty damn good if your codebase is well established.
Don’t get hung up on the editor, just use the tools available to get the job done, at the end of the day programming is converting concepts to text.