Helix

Helix is a text editor that runs inside a terminal and is driven from the keyboard. Its authors describe it as post-modern: it keeps the modal structure familiar from the vi lineage, where keys mean different things depending on the current mode, but reorders the basic editing grammar. Work proceeds by first establishing a selection and then applying an action to it, which is the reverse of the operator-then-motion habit carried over from vi and its descendants.

That difference is the main thing to weigh before adopting it. Users coming from other modal editors will find much of their muscle memory transferable in outline but wrong in detail, and existing configurations and plugins from those editors do not carry over. Readers evaluating it for daily work should expect a period of relearning key bindings.

It is published by Blaž Hrastnik under the MPL-2.0 licence. This entry records Linux as the platform; support elsewhere is a question for the project itself.