Ahhh nice, I have thought about trying out Kakoune as it supports plugins. Do you use many plugins/find them useful?

Helix does have a pipe command also.

Yeah I agree, I like that aspect too!

I use Helix

TLDR: Yes I think helix is worth trying out. It has some missing features but it is an amazing piece of software.

Yes I use helix daily. It is very fun to use and you can do many things faster. It is particularly good when navigating a (large) codebase you know fairly well. You are able to jump around and find/edit relevant code very quickly.

Compared to vs code:

• it is much faster and more minimal
• It might be harder to get things up and running than in vs code, e.g. to get auto-completion working in helix you need to have the LSP for that language installed. It can be a bit confusing if you have never done it before but it is easy once you have done it a few times.

Compared to neovim I think it is:

• easier to learn
• slightly faster - especially with large files
• you will have a much smaller/simpler configuration. AFAIK Helix has more features working out of the box than neovim (file picker, lsp support ect) and needs less configuration to get things to a workable state.

The downside of helix compared to both neovim and vscode is that it does not have plugin support yet so you will need to use other tools in combination with it to get an equivalent experience. Here are some tools that are commonly used with helix:

• yazi - terminal file manager
• gitui or lazygit - terminal git user interface
• zellij - terminal pane manager

Helix really shines when:

• performance matters - I have edited files with millions of lines and had no trouble on codebases where my colleagues IDE’s become very slow.
• You want to use multiple cursors at times
• You want a simple or no configuration
• It is taking too long to learn the vim keybindings - vim keybindings are more concise but less intuitive and harder to learn

I recommend you use the tutor (hx --tutor) for a few minutes each day to learn the keybidings.

Another day older and more tech debt

sure, done

You should check out zig, its compiler can even be used for c/c++. If you have time to listen to an interview, this developer voices interview on zig explains some of the advantages of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_oqWE9otaE&t=3970s

Putting aside the speed uv has a bunch of features that usually require 2-4 separate tools. These tools are very popular but not very well liked. The fact these tools are so popular proves that pip is not sufficient for many use cases. Other languages have a single tool (e.g. cargo) that are very well liked.

If you do multi stage builds (example here) it is slightly easier to use venvs.

If you use the global environment you need to hardcode the path to global packages. This path can change when base images are upgraded.

Sure, but in the case where you upgrade python and it affects python packages it would affect global packages and a venv in the same way.

upgrading your base image won’t affect your python packages

Surely if upgrading python will affect your global python packages it will also affect your venv python packages?

you can use multi stage builds to create drastically smaller final images

This can also be done without using venv’s, you just need to copy them to the location where global packages are installed.

He is a front end dev/engineer and he mainly talks about the UI (which is his expertise).

Here are their repos: https://github.com/zen-browser

and here is a video from Theo on youtube looking into zen browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKM2N4TQHQY

I don’t think they have anything to do with each other, it looks like prefix.dev uses conda packages.

Yeah it is, eventually they want UV to have feature parity with rye and rye will basically just be a pointer to UV

Early on uv was only trying to replace pip. This latest update is a big step towards becoming a poetry (and pyenv/pipx) replacement too.

Yeah I agree, I am sure they are missing some obscure stuff. But in practise it has everything that I use and there has been no need for me to touch flatpak/appimage/snap

object oriented

Python does have OOP but you are not at all forced to use it. You can write code in a functional or even procedural style.

typing

I do hate that python doesent have proper support for typing but I think weakly typed variables will actually help beginners as it is less to think about to start off with.

indentation

I think there are pros and cons here. In other languages it is considered good style to use indentation anyway.

I’m sure it is difficult to teach a large class like that though. It was hard enough for me to learn with a much more favourable teacher to student ratio than you probably have. Sorry but honestly I do sympathise with admin as well.

yep, I mean a GUI based software centre

NixOS:

• Largest and most up to date package repository (no need for flatpack/appimage/snap ect)
• Reproducible
• Declarative
• Rollbacks you can select at boot time
• No dependency conflicts

I think it will easily be the number 1 distro if/when they can :

• the steep learning curve (e.g. have a gui installer EDIT: As in a GUI software centre)
• documentation
• have more tools use nixos and have nixos in mind (e.g. there are a couple of tools that didn’t work for me because of specific C libraries not beeing present/configured on nixos that are present on other distros. some libraries implicitly expect these to be present).

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that not moving between mouse and keyboard so much reduces the risk of getting an RSI. So even if it didn’t make you faster it would still probably be worth it to find a keyboard based workflow.

I use Helix and would suggest you try it (at least to start off with) as it is easier to learn than vim and does not require plugins or a complex config. To answer your question I will go from the less to more advanced/complex:

1. Move a line to a new position in the file/another file (takes a couple of seconds)
   1. x then d to select a line (pressing N times will select N lines) and delete it (delete will also copy to the clipboard)
   2. navigate the cursor to the new location
   3. p to paste in a new
2. Navigating around a file:
   1. jumping to a function/class definition by pressing g then d when on a function/class usage.
   2. getting a list and navigating to class/function calls when the cursor is on a class/function definition by pressing g then r.
3. Multi cursor editing - I use this to make edits to multiple places at once. I most recently used this to extract the names of 30 tables that are used in a SQL file. This probably took ~5 seconds and I barely thought about it. To do this I used:
   1. % to select the entire files contents
   2. s to search
   3. typed "FROM "
   4. pressed enter to create cursor at all locations matching the search
   5. v then g then l to select the rest of the line
   6. space+y to copy to the system clipboard.
   7. paste into a document where I needed to list the tables
4. Using a terminal workspace manager (zellij) with helix and a git tui app (gitui) so that I can easily make code changes, commit, push, ,run tests, move to a new repo and more without leaving the keyboard.

There is actually a helix community on programming.dev: helix@programming.dev