Helix, two months later
I started using Helix in October. It's worked out well, I'm still using it, and it's likely to be my default text editor indefinitely.
I hadn't noticed that AceJump- / vim-easymotion-like functionality is built in. This is a great feature, and is exactly the sort of thing that I actively want, have wrestled with plugins to try to get with vim, and see out of the box in Helix.
If you're not familiar: in normal mode, if you type g (the general navigation prefix) and then w, the first two characters of each word are replaced by a code that lets you jump to it. So, e.g., this:
...gets replaced by this:
So, in this case, you could jump to This by typing af.
I'm not arguing that you should train yourself to navigate with gw, or that this feature is an independent reason to switch to Helix. But it's a great example of how much you get out of the box.
I've also found it easy to get the benefits of Helix without losing too much muscle memory. When I find that muscle memory is getting me stuck, I've found it easy to add to my config without doing anything that prevents me from also learning "the Helix way."
In case you're curious, this is the "for my vim muscle memory" fragment of my config file:
0 = "goto_line_start"
9 = "goto_line_end"
G = "goto_last_line"
"*" = ["move_char_right", "move_prev_word_start", "move_next_word_end", "search_selection", "search_next"]
"#" = ["move_char_right", "move_prev_word_start", "move_next_word_end", "search_selection", "search_prev"]
So far, the learning and adoption curves are just right. Setting up LSPs is straightforward, and you do it at the beginning, right when you're most motivated. After that, it's mostly finding the features (which Helix makes easy to find) and perhaps updating your config every now and then.
By the way, Gemini is (for me) the best tool by far for generating config lines. ChatGPT hallucinates Helix commands that don't exist constantly.