essentially a terminal modal editor (like vim), but instead of specifying the action to perform then what to perform the action on (like “yank 3 lines”), in helix you select first, then perform actions on the selection (like “these 3 lines, i want them yanked”). it’s slightly better (according to others) because you get to see what you’re going to change in the file so you don’t accidentally delete 5 lines instead of deleting 4.
on top of that many features are builtin, like tree-sitter and lsp support, so you don’t have to spend 5 hours looking for cool plugins and configuring everything to get started (my config file is only 50 lines of toml).
the downside is that there isn’t support for plugins (yet), but there’s already things like a file picker, more than 100 themes etc.
