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by _nalply 1011 days ago
Long ago, perhaps ten or more years, I used IntelliJ. It is a good IDE. Then last year I tried CLion with the Rust plugin. Still good. Not everything is smooth but that's not their fault. One example: it is frustrating to display values even if they implement Debug. The problem is that the debugger did not yet understand Rust's Debug. I was satisfied anyway.

After a year I didn't extend the license, however.

You see, I am mostly retired and program just for fun. And CLion does not do enough because I also write TypeScript, PHP, shell scripts, and even C sometimes. CLion is good for C, but now, I don't know if RustRover will cover C.

Now I switched to helix. Thirty years ago I learnt Emacs and later jed. You could say I am the pinky finger guy. In my fifties I decided to try something completely different, a modal editor. It took more than a year to slowly learn tricks. If programming were my job I wouldn't do that. I would stick to vscode or just Visual Studio or to a JetBrains product, because I know them and can work efficiently. With helix I did not yet reach this efficiency. But being retired it is more about fun instead of efficiency. helix is just more fun than these corporate offerings. Last week I switched Caps Lock and Esc and even created tap keybindings for the modifier keys (right tap-iso = open bracket, right tap-meta = close bracket for example). I am still in the process to adapt to the new keybindings but it makes me smile.

One caveat: when in a browser text input field, I sometimes hit the i key before typing. Anyone know this? I realized, I have to shift the mental model that browser text input fields are alreay and permanently in insert mode.

This said, I have a fond spot for JetBrains even if I left them.

4 comments

Helix is great! I learned Vim around five years ago, and bounced between it and VSCode for a while. I started using Neovim full-time for work and only moved to VSCode when a plugin upgrade broke my config.

Now, I use Helix too — it's not perfect, lots of quality of life features are missing, but upgrading _one thing_ and having it work correctly is really a pleasure.

Helix is really fun, it's fast, sane default feature set, things work out of the box, though last time I checked they still didn't have plugins (some stuff can be achieved with some shell magic, but still annoying to fallback to that).

Do you by any chance have your hx config open source? Would love to browse it and maybe steal some of your config!

I am not sure whether my config is really useful.

I added foot.ini but not evremap.toml and my xkb keymmap because these are not yet finished and very hacky.

https://gist.github.com/nalply/239c1e2ed13f5cb8ec4f3873fe64d...

> And CLion does not do enough because I also write TypeScript, PHP, shell scripts, and even C sometimes. CLion is good for C, but now, I don't know if RustRover will cover C.

CLion is the wrong product if you want to work in multiple languages. JetBrains has different IDEs for different purposes. You would want IntelliJ Ultimate and to use plugins for TypeScript, PHP, and even Rust with the plugin: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22407-rust

If you only wanted to work in a single language you can get that specific IDE.

You can also buy the all products pack to get everything they offer, which is a great deal.

You are correct. I had to decide to switch to Ultimate or not.
Whoa, another (ex?) jed user in the wild. I still install it on new servers, and that was how other admins know if I was ever there. Smaller and faster than installing emacs.
Haha! "In the wild" gave me the visual image of me roaming through a foggy mountain forest with my laptop under my arm and sometimes sitting down and programming in jed and you spotting me and hopefully not shooting me.