[manaskarekar]

Stating the obvious - the edit modes are fundamentally different and helix doesn't have a plugin ecosystem yet.

Helix uses the kakoune model:

vi basic grammar is verb followed by object; it’s nice because it matches well with the order we use in English, "delete word". On the other hand, it does not match well with the nature of what we express: There is only a handful of verbs in text editing (delete, yank, paste, insert… ), and they don’t compose, contrarily to objects which can be arbitrarily complex, and difficult to express. That means that errors are not handled well. If you express your object wrongly with a delete verb, the wrong text will get deleted, you will need to undo, and try again.

Kakoune’s grammar is object followed by verb, combined with instantaneous feedback, that means you always see the current object (In Kakoune we call that the selection) before you apply your change, which allows you to correct errors on the go.

Source: https://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why-kakoune.html

[quesera]

This is a great point, although of course vim does let you visually select before verbing a chunk of text. Useful for cases where your object spec doesn't fit into the easy categories of character/word/block/etc.

I'm not familiar with the Kakoune or Helix selection UX, but it's keystroke-economical in vim (of course).

[KapKap55]

How is this different than Vim's visual/visual-line/visual-block modes? Other than the mode now being the default behavior, that is.

[leephillips]

As I recall from trying this out a while back, it’s different mainly in being less powerful and flexible. In [n]vim you can combine these selections with all the vim grammar, including, essentially, its text objects.