[bgar]

Pretty much every engineer needs to use Vim/vi when logged into any server, so from that point of view, this shouldn’t even be a question. I don’t think knowing how to use a modal editor in 2026 is a flex anymore, it’s just standard. But if you’re planning to commit to modal editing as a lifestyle, you should be using Helix, not Neovim.

[Gooblebrai]

Why Helix and not Neovim?

[bgar]

It’s one of those tools that’s well designed and you don’t need a thousand line configuration file to be productive. The modal editing style is also an improvement over vim/neovim because you do selection -> action rather than action -> selection. Lastly, it’s written in Rust, which is not a plus purely because of that but because it’s a lot easier to contribute code changes to or tweak a modern Rust codebase.

[lenkite]

Hard disagree. It is not an improvement - it is a deterioration.

Repeat (dot command .) is far more powerful and general thanks to operator->action.

Much better composability with counts, registers, marks and operators with operator->action

Operator Pending mode has some unique advantages for swipe edits that are painful in a select first paradigm. Ex: `d/foo<CR>`. No fast equivalent in Helix.

Also, if you really want, you can select in VIM and do your job too. Use visual mode with `v`.