First impressions...

[dimaqq]

I've been using vim for a long while, customised, with plugins, so take my first experience with a grain of salt, maybe I'm not your target user.

1‍⃣ the default theme is funky, but not particularly useful?

2‍⃣ Grepping through the theme dir didn't help me find a decent theme, and with so many pointless these around, it took ages to find what I was looking for. Folks who use OLED or QLED displays need black to be black, because that's where these monitors shine (anti-pun intended), dark_high_contrast seems to be best built-in theme for that.

3‍⃣ where are the convenient aliases? acronyms? shortcuts? I mean like :vspl for :vsplit and :qall! for :quit-all!?

4‍⃣ where's :help? 😱 how do I even find my current settings? oh, horror!

5‍⃣ why does d delete single character immediately and dd doesn't delete a line?

6‍⃣ where's partial history search?

I've given 🧬 helix 🧬 a fair half an hour of my time, and it is fast. In the end I have to go back to my familiar setup to get things done.

Looking forward to great things from this project in the future!

[illegitimate-egg]

5. Helix has a different model to vim, d is generic deletion. If you want to delete a line you press x first to select a line

[leo-unglaub]

Hey,
i think its always very cool to hear feedback from new people using the software. There is a way of thingking about stuff when you are new to something that can be very refreshing.

the default theme is funky, but not particularly useful?

That is a matter of taste, i tend to agree with you there, but as you mentioned, you can choose what ever you want.

Grepping through the theme dir didn't help me find a decent theme

This seams to be a huge mistake. Don't grep in there, just open some files as reference from your project and then to :theme and tab thru the list. You get a live preview. I am sure you find some nice themes.

why does d delete single character immediately and dd doesn't delete a line?

Helix is not Vim, it follows a different editing model. I feel you, switching over from Vim was hard for the first view days, but now i actually prefer the editing model over Vim. I used the default config on every one of my 200 servers. (Only thing i with the default would change is the behavour of X.

Looking forward to great things from this project in the future!

I hope to see you again giving Helix a try