Sure, what I’m saying is that they’re both editors that you need to invest time in. A bit less so with helix since it has better defaults so you don’t need to spend as much time configuring it, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference.

Helix has better defaults for sure and I get why people might prefer it but I have a very hard time imagining it being a better choice than vim in every situation even with a lot more development.

Also, if you work with programming for example your editor is going to be one of your main tools and I think that “reading guides” is an acceptable amount of effort to put in to learning such a tool. Vim has a higher barrier of entry than it needs to (this can to some extent be explained with backwards compatability) but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.

The biggest thing missing from helix right now imo is plugin support, so a lot of plugins that I really like wouldn’t be available. I use fugitive a lot for working with git for example.

Another one is the quickfix list in combination with ex commands. One thing you can do for example is setup :make to run your compiler and then when you get compilation errors they’ll show up in your quickfix list. You can then use :Cfilter to focus on one type of error and then :cdo to for example do a find and replace on the remaining lines.

In general, if I don’t have an lsp available for whatever reason (I work in cmake a fair amount at my $DAYJOB for example) I would much rather use vim, in particular because of the stuff that you can do with ex commands that I mentioned above (also works great with grep) but also because of the ctags support.

Helix can do a lot of nice things out of the box for a lot of cases of software editing, but it’s not nearly as broad or as customizable of a tool as vim

I don’t really see the point in a “facebook competitior” since the only appeal of facebook is that it’s “normal” and “evryone” is on it, something that just isn’t going to be true for e.g. some fediverse product. Everyone should stop using facebook if possible though, I’m trying to persuade different messenger groupchats that I’m part of to switch to something else left and right personally

Vim still has a lot of advantages over helix. Being modern doesn’t automatically make a tool better

I’ve been wanting a phone with a keyboard for a long time, I don’t think I’ll get this one (I specifically got a fairphone in part so I wouldn’t have to think about buying a new phone for a couple of years) but I think that this could be really nice for some specific usecases that are underserved today.

With arch, I’d recommend just jumping in the deep and and installing it, looking things up on the wiki when something goes wrong. Just do it in a virtual machine or on an old laptop or something to start with. I broke my previous distro (mint) by doing some really stupid stuff, and I decided to just go fuck it and install arch. I don’t think I’ve ever learned as much about linux as that weekend.

I suppose that I was already pretty comfortable with the terminal since I was studying computer science at the time so I had a lot of reason to use it. I think the best way to use the terminal is to force yourself to use it, programming is great for this but you can try e.g. sorting your photos or mp3 files or something as practice too.

As long as you have your windows license key you can change your mind later so really you can do whatever. I’d recommend giving 100% linux a try if that seems fun. Obviously you’re gonna want to back up any interesting files that you have on windows either way.

If anything I think that the current rust discourse is a fad. I’m not sure what it is about rust that makes people have so strong opinions about it but I can’t wait for it to become a “normal” language so that people can chill about it a bit.

Well he speaks english so in that sense he’s english speaking