Developer Experiments

My usual environment for writing code, writing markdown files, uploading to my Git Repository etc is VSCode

VSCode is a bit heavy really for my day to day use, although it works very well. So recently I have been thinking about finding smaller, lightweight programmes to do the same tasks. A couple of go to's are EMACS and VIM/NeoVIM. They both come with a VERY large learning curve, plus they can do a whole lot more than I really need...

From looking at both the above I found Helix. It is very similar to both EMACS and VIM but a lot lighter and with only one purpose - being a Text Editor.

There is still a steep learning curve with Helix, but it feels more surmountable.

Helix runs in the terminal. It is designed to be used with the keyboard as the primary way of navigating and entering information. There are are dozens of Key Bindings to learn before its use would become second nature. That,though is something that comes through use, and through muscle memory, as you use those key-strokes.

In addition to general editing tasks VSCode was quite good at enabling uploads directly to Git. Helix does not do this out of the box, although from what I read it may do so in the future. For now I could use the termninal directly or as I am doing use a GUI in the terminal. I am looking at LazyGit for this purpose.

This all probably comes across as quite geeky stuff to most of those reading this blog..! For me though I find it keeps the grey matter working.