I have been trying out Helix for the last few months as part of my now 24 year quest to incorporate some form of vi into my daily routine. This time, it's looking good. What sets it apart are the (zero-conf) built-in LSP and tree-sitter highlighting, and the select-verb modal keybindings instead of vi's verb-object syntax, where you see what you're about to do before you do it. Some of the key combinations also show a reminder menu, aiding the learning process, which is a nice touch over plain old vi which has zero discoverability. General performance is also very good, the editor feels a lot snappier than a fully loaded Neovim or Doom Emacs, or a monster like Visual Code.
I think there are plans to see if a graphical editor could be built on top of it, which would be an interesting project. As a new Rust graphical tree-sitter based editor, it would probably rival the upcoming open-or-not Zed editor by the Atom folks.
Man, I don't know what has happened but the spur for new editors has.been delightful. I have been using Zed for a bit since I made it into the closed beta, but it has been very nice to use. VSCode does the job pretty well, but it just feels more clunky to me, and I have hitches quite often. It is not bad, but I want something more performant while giving me the style of vim and emacs. Zed definitely has some rough edges and some sorely missing features (that are being worked on), but it just feels better to use.
I know so many people probably discount these projects because of the RIIR meme, but it really has spurred more inovations that we should all be grateful for.
RIIR doesn't scare me at all -- as a user, my experience has been the rust rewrites are usually high-quality improvements over the original. Ripgrep is legendary!
It is a huge accomplishment of Rust to enable the creation of better versions of lang-standing highly-optimized-C tools.
(Which inspired me to kick the tires a bit on the language; it felt like C++ done right to me. Being able to write threaded code w/o fear of data-races is very cool.)
I actually think that the place where it could potentially really shine is when you have to do remote shell work. I don't know if you can specify the runtime folder but if you use it as a simple replacement for nano on old machines that don't have a proper editor this would be perfect.
vscode is very good at this, and is the primary reason why I even use it.
Frankly speaking the vim/emacs lines are yet to catch up with this sort of thinking. vscode feels like you are editing on the local machine. The experience is seamless and feels magical.
Tramp in all honesty was not that seamless, its just that these are great editors, but they were not invented in the context of the overall changes in how programming is done today. To me the biggest plus of emacs/vim is they make it easy to navigate and manipulate text, that's pretty much it.
Every other feature seems to be an after thought therefore is not subject to the same experience the modern editors have. They also have a huge learning and set up time, and can send you down configuration hell for lots of things.
Emacs is completely programmable so I don't think it needed to be invented for these specific use cases. The entire point is that you can program it to do what you want it to do!
Emacs can certainly be a little clunky at times though which can put a lot of people off. It does take some configuration and tuning for your personal preferences to feel good, but the upside is that it can do way more than the alternatives can do if someone/yourself puts in the effort to implement it. Magit is a great example of such a thing, the interface and functionality is extremely nice, even compared to something like Intelli-j's git GUI which is a pretty impressive feat!
With that being said it's not for everyone (and that's okay)!
I can't vouch too much for it as I've used it for maybe 1 hour tops, but the remote capabilities of vscode were pretty seamless for that one hour.
Emacs+Tramp definitely does not feel like you're editing locally. A surprising amount of things work, but many others will fail in annoying ways or are just clearly not supported.
I think there are plans to see if a graphical editor could be built on top of it, which would be an interesting project. As a new Rust graphical tree-sitter based editor, it would probably rival the upcoming open-or-not Zed editor by the Atom folks.