File Explorer is merged to Helix editor

  • I used to believe that a File explorer is crucial in my text editor; after using Helix for more than a year, I’ve discovered that is not required at all; space+f much faster use flow. I work with split terminal windows, where I have supporting windows to navigate the file system.

    Happy to try a file explorer once again, it’ll be interesting to see how I feel a year later.

  • I like the idea of doing browsing in folders containing files as navigating between edit buffers.

    I've been editing like that since the 1990s because that's how Emacs and XEmacs do it (M-x dired command). The ease and speed of just pressing RETURN on the .. menu to go up or on the folder name to open and look inside is unrivalled and much faster than using my mouse (and better for health - avoids RSI).

    Would be cool for Helix to get Emacs-like directories-as-edit-buffers functionality!

  • Oil for nvim is THE best explorer i have used. Highly recommend

  • I was waiting for this to try switching… and now I’ve discovered oil.nvim and can never go back.

  • What I really want to see merged is the tokens in shell commands. dotnet is my day job, and the boilerplate (its luckily just namespace nowadays) gets repetitive and typo-prone. If I could just (approximately) `dotnet new class -o $cwd`...

    Instead we have something like 3 closed PRs for this.

  • One of the long-awaited features was recently merged!

  • I get that Helix is really fast (I also use it sometimes) but some of those screen-grabs could be made bit slower so one could see what is actually happening.

    Anyway I hope this will be soon included in release! (Even if current <space>+f is also pretty good.)

  • ... but can it read emails?

    Jamie Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

  • Great news! When I'm familiar with the project space+F works great, but isn't great for discovery.

  • Yay!!! Been waiting!!!