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HelixSoftware

Who uses, recommends or left Helix, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

4 people

Jon Seager
Software engineer and engineering leader at Canonical, working on Ubuntu; writes about his homelab and tooling at jnsgr.uk.
loved

I’ve been really impressed - Helix is fast, the default features are great and I don’t anticipate returning to vim.

A long post on moving his daily driver from NixOS back to Ubuntu, listing the tools he settled on.

2025-06-24·jnsgr.uk ↗

Mario Zechner
Austrian developer. Created the libGDX game framework, and more recently the pi coding agent, which moved with them to Earendil — Armin Ronacher's company — in April 2026. Writes at mariozechner.at.
liked

helix seems like a great idea.

2026-09-10·x.com ↗

Kalwabed Rizki
Indonesian fullstack engineer, speaker and instructor; writes about JavaScript, SvelteKit and Linux tooling at kalwabed.com.
liked

Helix: my previous favorite terminal editor. I've been a Visual Studio Code user for a long time. But this change has really allowed me to move faster.

His /uses page, an overview of the tech and tools he uses as a developer day to day. The date here is the last commit to the page's own source file, src/pages/uses.astro in his site repo kalwabed/kalwabed.com.

2025-12-20·kalwabed.com ↗

Julia Evans
Programmer and writer at jvns.ca; author of the Wizard Zines programming zines.
liked

One of my favourite things about Helix is the search!

Notes after three months of switching from Vim to the Helix editor.

2025-10-10·jvns.ca ↗

What they also use

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.