For me, I really want to get into niri, but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet).
Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.
I love Helix. I like that it pretty much works out of the box and the only thing you have to do is install language servers and in some cases configure them, but that’s (mostly) well documented. No need to install plugins or use a preset “distribution” like with NeoVim. I also like the built-in keyboard shortcut hints, for example when you press g (goto) it shows you what key will do what.
The way Helix does “select first, then act” is subjective, but I like it.
This is the reason I liked kakoune right away after I started using it: select, then act, and every movement is also a selection.
Agree on all counts. I didn’t like finding and comparing plugins for neovim, and then wrestling with environment stuff to get them to work, and having to change a bunch of options to get nvim to work how I want. With helix, my config of things I’ve changed from default is very small, and there’s no wrestling with plugins.
And yeah, “select then act” feels a lot smoother and more intuitive to me. If you like that and like plugins tho, check out kakuone