An articulated rationale for why a fork would go a long way for awareness of why an existing user of Helix might consider to use Mitos instead (or not) really needs to be the first thing we see on the front page of the site for Mitos.

One thing that really sticks out to me and gives me a feeling I won't consider to use Mitos, is the presentation further down on Mitos' front page of rendering of image files inside the terminal emulator. I rather that an image viewing program be opened, maybe called with options to not display interface widgets, and to be displayed in a new window tab. I use i3 or Sway, so I already have macros that do just this, and I don't fail to appreciate that others have this luxury (or not).

Alternative branches, or even forks like this are a good thing. Sometimes these help reach new consensus and merge back into the original project making the new project stronger, provided the original reason for a fork wasn't really issues of conflicting personalities.

I think a fork of Helix can be a step in the right direction. But "view images inside the terminal" doesn't pass the smell test. The mindset of displaying images inside of a terminal window and the macOS window decorations in the example screenshots, those two things together are part and parcel.

Loved helix and batteries included philosophy but was wishing for more batteries. Specifically the lack of a good diff viewer. Yes I can create a shortcut to lazygit but the way swapping between processes worked was buggy and uncomfortable.

And even though abstractly I like helix's keyboard model better than vim, I wish there was a way to just switch to vim mode because it is too ingrained.

Maybe this fork can address some of this either directly or by allowing plugins.

This looks nice, though I already use and like Helix. What is the motivation behind the fork?

It's a fascinating time to launch a new code editor. I haven't properly used one for months (except some small .env changes and the like). Even Zed seems to be moving away from the "editor" part, into Delta.

I have been building a batteries-included vim-like editor for a couple of years. It all started as a series of streamings but I really like where it is right now.

https://youtu.be/eX1ZhXY0VZU?si=hUufOFS5ifTGeh-g

If you're looking for something like that I'd love if you could take it for a spin:

https://getred.dev

Been working on a similar idea of an in-terminal IDE with more and more batteries included

https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast

In the grim dark future, there is no longer need for a text editor

What does it do differently from Helix?

I've been building my own personal editor, borrowing some of the features I enjoyed in Helix and other editors - https://github.com/joefreeman/aether - being able to deeply customise has been satisfying.

The logo looks like Mixtral's, the name sounds like Anthropic's Mithos..

I understand its not cool to not be fluent in Vim, but all I want is a better version of `micro`. is it possible to setup Mitos like that?

Fuck it all, I went back to nano. > nano -lmx0 is good enough.

last time i looked at it i couldn’t figure out what the difference was or why anyone would choose this over helix.

Ok I'd like to bring up something a bit more bold/controversial: why are we building big TUIs at all? Like... ever? Isn't it pretty trivial to make your rust GUI native across the three major operating systems these days, or am I underestimating that?

I prefer a TUI to a heavy Electron app, don't get me wrong. But Helix (& Mitos!) seem like a baffling choice compared to Sublime Text. Not worse: I literally don't understand the appeal.

I think you're underestimating this. I released a GUI app in Rust earlier this year, and I already feel like it was a headache because there was pretty much no way to avoid dynamically linking a bunch of stuff, at which point any confidence of it working across various distros went out the window, so I had to settle for an AppImage as the only binary that I distributed. I wasn't even trying to target Windows or MacOS but I have to assume that would complicate things at least as much.

I'm not saying it's insurmountable, but I don't think it's accurate to call it "trivial". There are comments on this thread mentioning that Helix hasn't released in a while but that it's relatively straightforward to build from source; I'm not confident that would be easy to preserve for a full GUI.

It's a lot easier to write and customize tuis. And it works over ssh. The appeal is probably that it's good, performant, functioning software. As a counterpoint what's the appeal of sublime over vim? What is the gui providing that I don't already have?

How would you do it? Honestly curious?

If I were to build an editor, I’d want the GUI platform-native so would probably go straight for Xcode and Swift.

If I had a strong aversion to Swift, I might consider a hybrid design where the UI is Swift and write a backend in a modern, fast language I prefer (Go/Rust/C# come to mind, but this isn’t a call-to-arms in the language wars). I believe this could be achieved since LSP works well as a backend server supplying IDE-level niceties, so I could keep most functionality implementations there. I’d have to have a strong reason though since Swift is a fine language, and AI does much of the writing now.

Then again, most devs live on a Mac and deploy to Linux, and are increasingly using Agents which may be better off cloud-hosted or at least sandboxed, so lightweight Swift UI and most logic in a headless cli app could be an interesting design choice.

But the important part to me would be low-bloat and native UI, and I’ve never found cross-platform UI frameworks to hold up in practice — even if only because different OSes necessarily have different ideas of idiomatic design, so you’d either be using least common denominator UI components that feel uncanny, or reimplementing the UI for each platform.

Have you found a language / framework combo that’s fast, fits into the OS well, and is _fun_ to write and use? Or is your idea that separate implementations are now so low cost — who cares — let the AI maintain them?

Legitimately asking in good faith, so please don’t interpret anything as snippy in there — it’s just my understanding of the state of the world. I’d genuinely love to learn about how cross-platform options have expanded if I’m missing something!