zellij, helix, fish and other batteries-included software

12 Jan 2023

The trends in the software-that-has-caught-my-attention the last few years:

‘batteries-included’ - Managing and hacking together huge config files for things like vim isn’t that fun for me. I like sane defaults. One of the arguments for learning and using vim is that it’s on every system… but if I’m using a heavily customized vim, then it’s not the same on every system.
terminal based - very responsive interfaces, even on the ‘underpowered’ computers I use, like Chromebooks, Raspberry Pi.
vim style keybindings. But also key-bindings that are chained and make sense semantically. Helix and zellij even show hints and menus for commands to make it easier to learn.
- Example: In Helix, to search text across a project, it’s <space>, / (spacebar, then /) rather than combining many modifiers like cmd-shift-f. Also, to do things related to tabs in zellij, it’s ctrl-t, n (to create a [n]ew tab), a pane would be ctrl-p, n
Written in Rust. This just seems common on projects started within the last few years?
Positive and active communities
Open source

Some projects I’ve liked