Helix

What happens when you rethink modal editing from scratch. Helix ships with LSP support, tree-sitter highlighting, fuzzy search, multiple cursors, and surround — all built in, zero configuration. While Neovim users spend weekends tweaking their init.lua, Helix users are already editing.

Neovim is the customization king — infinite plugins, infinite possibilities. Vim is the classic. Kakoune inspired Helix's selection-first model. Zed is the modern GUI alternative. VS Code is what everyone else uses.

Helix flips the Vim verb-object model to selection-verb: select first, then act. It sounds small but it's a revelation — you always see what you're about to change. The built-in file picker, buffer management, and LSP integration mean a productive setup in minutes, not days.

The catch: no plugin system yet. A WASM-based plugin architecture is planned but not shipped. If your workflow depends on specific Vim plugins — fugitive, telescope, harpoon — Helix can't replace them. The community is growing but still a fraction of Neovim's, and MPL-2.0 licensing is fine for most but worth noting.