Helix certainly won't give you a 10x improvement. It tends to convert a lot of people moving "up" from VS Code, and still a decent chunk, but certainly fewer neovim users moving "down".
Advantages of Helix are pretty straightforward:
1. Very little configuration bullshit to deal with. There's not even a plugin system yet! You just paste your favorite config file and language/LSP config file and you're good to go. For anything else, submit a pull request.
2. Built in LSP support for basically anything an LSP exists for.
3. There's a bit of a new generation command line IDE forming itself around zellij (tmux that doesn't suck) + helix + yazi (basically nnn or mc on crack, highly recommended).
That whole zellij+helix+yazi environment is frankly a joy to work in, and might be the 2-3x improvement over neovim that makes the switch worth it.
Like I wrote, I looked at Helix. Seems cool but not enough for me to switch. And I would have to install it on the machines I work on, which very often I can't do because of company policies, or can't waste the non-billable time on.
I only recently moved from screen to tmux, and I still have to fall back to screen sometimes because tmux doesn't come with every Linux distro. I expect I will retire before I think tmux (or screen, for that matter) "sucks" to the point I would look at something else. And again I very often can't install things on customer servers anyway.
It conflicts with the clipboard and a bunch of hotkeys, and configuring it never works because they have breaking change in how their config file works ever 6months or so.
These days I only use it to launch a long running job in ssh to detach the session it's on and leave.
That’s more or less what I use it for — keeping sessions alive. I don’t use 90% of the features. vim does splits, and there’s ctrl-Z to background it and get a shell.
I know I could get more out of tmux but haven’t really needed to. I use it with the default config. I have learned from experience that the less I try to customize my environment the less non-billable time I waste trying to get that working and maintaining it.
Advantages of Helix are pretty straightforward:
1. Very little configuration bullshit to deal with. There's not even a plugin system yet! You just paste your favorite config file and language/LSP config file and you're good to go. For anything else, submit a pull request.
2. Built in LSP support for basically anything an LSP exists for.
3. There's a bit of a new generation command line IDE forming itself around zellij (tmux that doesn't suck) + helix + yazi (basically nnn or mc on crack, highly recommended).
That whole zellij+helix+yazi environment is frankly a joy to work in, and might be the 2-3x improvement over neovim that makes the switch worth it.