Indeed. Helix's multi-cursor support seems like a rocket-powered chainsaw to me.
It's powerfully expressive. IIRC, you can select a region (such as a whole file), split the selection into multiple cursors, retain only the selections which match a regex, among other things.
What is the equivalent of Sublime's Ctrl + D? Double-clicking to select something, then Ctrl + D to select all instances of that something, while creating multi carets on each.
Understandable, for sure, but the number of users who want their own "simple" addition means it gets overwhelming pretty quickly. Helix has deferred work on most extra functionality until after implementing a Scheme extension language. Once that's done, adding features might be as simple as installing a plugin.
Authors are free to do as they please, but as an entitled member of the peanut gallery…aren’t there already enough small configuration languages? Seems like a distraction when there are already hundreds of schemes, Lua, Janet, etc.
In that case, Kakoune[1] (Helix’s main inspiration) is probably more your jam. You get an RPC interface and are free to script it from anything you want (shell to Rust is about the range I’ve encountered). It does mean that you don’t get the batteries you get with Helix (e.g. LSP support) and need to bring your own (e.g. kakoune-lsp[2]).
Is including batteries the main reason helix seems to have started taking off, while kakoune hasn't?
I use kakoune, because I like the client/server architecture for managing multiple windows, which helix can't do. The less configuring I do the better, but I've hardly done any in the past year. It's nice to have the option.
