A Vim Guide for Advanced Users

Re:A Vim Guide for Advanced Users by Galanwe on Thursday December 01, 2022 @04:27AM (#33814127)

What annoyed me with helix was that invisible characters are treated the same as characters. That means your cursor can be positioned after the end of the line, on the '\n' and just sit there.

For instance, if you press "A", you are now after the \n of the end of line, and pressing backspace will remove the \n, joining with the line below.

I tried to ask whether that peculiar behavior could be toggled off somehow, but was welcomed by a wall of extreme purism on how treating differently visible and invisible characters would break the character model of the editor...

I'm too old to entertain the argument, and will just stick back to vim. Maybe its character model is unpure, but at least it's understandable by a mere mortal like me.

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Re:A Vim Guide for Advanced Users by pdobsan on Thursday December 01, 2022 @06:02AM (#33814782)

There is a pending pull request partially addressing this:

    https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/4204

It would be nice to have a comprehensive and convincing explanation in the documentation which sheds lights at the advantages of helix's treating lines. Maybe we vim old timers could learn something new and make a more informed decision about switching to helix.

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Re:A Vim Guide for Advanced Users by archseer on Thursday December 01, 2022 @08:30AM (#33815954)

Treating newlines as regular characters allows you to use them in motions: t<Enter> will select text until end of the line for example.

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