Helix keymap

[humb1t]

I know it can be tricky, but the only reason preventing me from day to day use of zed is Helix with their beautiful system based on keys without mouse, multiple selections and other features.

Will be great to support that and maybe I will try to research possible ways to do so:
https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html

[3210jr]

Zed is pretty awesome and support for the helix bindings would be nice. Can we do a bounty for someone from the community/core to get this running? I am not so skilled myself 😀.

I can do $100 for anything helix bindings related.

[JosephTLyons]

Zed is pretty awesome and support for the helix bindings would be nice. Can we do a bounty for someone from the community/core to get this running? I am not so skilled myself 😀.

I can do $100 for anything helix bindings related.

Hey @3210jr - this is an extremely nice gesture; if I had to guess, I think the biggest blocker isn't that someone doesn't want to do it, it is probably more that at the moment, contributing to keymaps is a bit awkward at the moment. We don't have documentation on what all the contexts are, the source code of Zed is closed (not for much longer 🥳), the keymaps repository is simply a mirror of the internal files in Zed, so changes made to either end have to be manually copied and pasted between repos. It's all just very awkward and sort of hard to do. Someone could still do it for sure, but the process is kind of ugly and not user friendly. I imagine that once we are open source, and once we move keymaps into some sort of user-accessible directory, or plugin system, that we will have a lot more fixes to existing keymaps, and new keymaps in general, coming in.

[nyabinary]

Zed + Helix would be extremely nice :3

[alphabitserial]

I would absolutely love to have this. I've been using Helix as my main editor for several months. Having a GUI with the same ergonomics would be fantastic.

[seanchen1991]

Now that the repository has been open-sourced, what would be a rough outline of adding Helix keymap support? 🙂

[danriedl]

I would absolutely love to have this. I've been using Helix as my main editor for several months. Having a GUI with the same ergonomics would be fantastic.

I'm in the same spot but have to say, that i'll stick to helix itself.
Tried helix - binding in vscode but still it's not the same experience.

[ascarter]

@JosephTLyons I think the request here would be to do a modal keymap that is Selection-Action instead of Action-Selection. There are multiple modal editors now (which Helix is probably one of the best) that use this model. If Zed could support it, would be really cool to see.

Another thought long term - NeoVim crew embedded their engine into VS Code. You can run the editor window using NeoVim but within the rest of VS Code. Would be very interesting for Zed to do something like this where another terminal type engine could power the editor. Maybe a chance to get the best of both worlds.

[andreweades]

I would like to look into this as I use Helix in preference to vim when I can. But how to do it? Is it a complete new mode? Or is it a key-binding hack on vim-mode?

[clo4]

@andreweades You'd have to introduce a new helix crate to implement some of the actions, and create a new keymap to use the actions. It's distinct enough from Vim that it would probably warrant a new editing mode, because selection->action really is a distinct paradigm from action->motion. But it might be worth taking a step back and instead of just copying the Helix keymap thinking about what it might look like to design a selection->action keymap just for Zed. Most of the infrastructure is already there! Would it feel different from Kakoune and Helix given it's in a GUI editor?

[wmstack]

Also I do like the helix bindings but I don't like to retain the selection when returning using insert mode or append mode. I have this mapped in helix a = ['append_mode', 'collapse_selection'] and i = ['insert_mode', 'collapse_selection']. I hope similar bindings can be supported in Zed.

Also vim doesn't really allow you to select the newline character (or the emptiness at the end of the buffer). Helix does. I have a hard time differentiating a whitespace from a newline in helix so I hope the cursor changes colour or something when it is on a newline character.