Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hou32hou 102 days ago
> It shows the creator comes from VSCode

Hey, one of the creators here, I actually daily drove Neovim for two years, before switching to Helix for a while, then finally Ki.

> multi-cursor is a useless feature

I was a Neovim macro user until I figured out how insane that was compared to multi-cursor after using Helix.
2 comments
cassepipe 102 days ago
I still think their point about search and replace still stand though. I make most my edits with regex in neovim nowadays and I feel this is the superior paradigm: You don't even need to get to some specific location in order to edit it. I also almost only use search to move around the file and I can even reuse the searches for substitutions. It makes most vim motions and commands almost useless for me nowadays.

I also feel like macros are a more clunky and error prone way to do what substitutions can do. Almost never use them.

link
gorjusborg 102 days ago
Yeah, macros are definitely helpful at times, but not as much as one might think.

I think the same goes for multi-cursor, though.

link
worksonmine 102 days ago
> I was a Neovim macro user until I figured out how insane that was compared to multi-cursor after using Helix.

Multi-cursor was the first plugin I installed when I moved from VSCode to Vim because I was used to hitting Ctrl+d to select all words and then replacing. Does Helix do something different?

1) First I reach for <C-v> for visual block selection if everything is neatly aligned.

2) Next choice is %s/search/replace(/c if I need confirm).

3) Macros, and I love it everytime I get to use them. I just record the movements, copy what I need to copy, paste it where I need to paste it, and it's repeatable for every line or block where the *formatting* matches. And this is the important part, the words don't matter. I still feel like a wizard using them.

As far as I understand multi-cursor option 3 is a no-go without macros if the words don't match. But macros don't care as long as the movements translate to the same edits. How does Helix multi-cursor work that make macros insane?

link
hou32hou 102 days ago
Sorry for derailing a bit, the search and replace using a query make sense for purly textual (non-syntactic) editing, but if you want to apply consistent syntactic modifications across multiple locations in the same file, you will need both multi-cursor and syntax node selection/navigation/modification.

It's hard to explain unless you actually try Ki, because it is a paradigm shift

link
worksonmine 102 days ago
Or you could use grn for LSP rename[1] in Neovim and it will rename all references across the project. VSCode and other IDEs have a similar feature, but compared to multi-cursor that's cheating.

I'll give you that using the AST to select the references is an interesting addition to multi-cursor, but I still don't see how they would be useful compared to my current workflow.

[1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp/#vim.lsp.buf.rename()

link