The existence of a repeat or “magic” key is one of the more interesting developments alternative keyboard layouts designs. The use case is slightly different of course.
But as an extremely heavy user of vim repeat and macros for the last two decades, it strikes me as a wee bit audacious to so completely dismiss its utility.
Hmm
In that situation, what I do is essentially save a macro (recording the selection and the edit) with `Q` and then `q` becomes my equivalent to `.`
Re:Helix Editor Release 25.07 Highlights
by cayley_graph on Thursday July 17, 2025 @01:17AM
(#44589919)
Good note; there's almost always a (somewhat less convenient) workaround. I find the visual feedback that induces these compromises actively annoying, so don't want to give up anything for it. Different strokes, of course!
Helix would _ideally_ like you to tell it ahead-of-time everywhere you're going to make an edit by selecting all the edit points with multiple cursors, without a great option to fire edits on the fly. Ironically I found this worse for visual feedback when making larger edits---where it's most needed---because there are usually edits happening off screen, instead of only at the point of the cursor (where the latter can be easily repeated).
It ends up feeling less interactive and more like I'm using a batch editor due to this, which (I think?) was not its intention.