Next Meeting – Tuesday, July 8th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.
Wolf will explain and live-demo the most impressive and useful features and design of the Helix editor.
Helix is an open source, text/terminal-based modal editor (in the spirit of Vim) you might run locally
or over SSH. In some ways it’s bare-bones. In other ways it is very much “batteries included”.
Some (positive) differences from Vim:
- select first, then act on the selection (sort of like Vim’s VISUAL mode, and exactly how every other editor in the world works).
- Multiple selections.
- Configured with TOML instead of with VimScript.
- Configuration file size differences are drastic.
- LSP aware and tree-sitter built in make syntax-highlighting, language-based text-objects, inline diagnostics, and higher-level operations on language constructs available with no plugins.
Helix has been around for a while, has an active development community, and the whole thing is written in Rust.
Like Vim, Helix isn’t for everyone; but there are some very compelling features. It’s worth trying, and Wolf will show you why.
Wolf has been coding for decades in many languages, at many companies, and on many projects.
He’s an expert in Git, Vim, Python, software design, algorithms, and general coding best-practices.
Some places he’s worked: Netscape/Mozilla, LucasArts, Apple, Trolltech, and Macromedia.
Python is his favorite language, but Rust is catching up fast.
At Mozilla, he was the C++ language lawyer in residence for nearly a decade.
He currently works at Dynamic Map Platform North America building Qt apps in Python that leverage PostgreSQL, Open Street Maps, and their own proprietary map data.
He is a cohost (along with Jim McQuillan) of a wildly popular technology podcast called “Runtime Arguments”, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic.This month it’ll be the ln command for creating hard and soft links.