Over maybe the last year or two, I feel like I’ve slowly been losing touch with the way I interact with computers. I don’t totally know how to describe it, but it’s been building for a while. Something feels off, and it’s more than just annoyance with a specific tool.

Getting comfortable with VS Code, then uneasy

Earlier in that period, I had grown very accustomed to VS Code. And VS Code is fine. It’s nicely integrated with a ton of stuff: language servers, extensions, all that jazz. It does a lot, and for a long time that worked for me.

But I was also becoming more and more unhappy with it. It’s an Electron app, it can be pretty heavy, and while I knew the interaction model well, it started to feel like friction instead of familiarity. I found myself constantly reloading it to get extensions or exceptions to behave properly, and at some point I just stopped feeling like I was editing code well in it, if that makes sense.

Discovering Helix and feeling pulled back

Then I started playing around with Helix. As I got more comfortable with it, VS Code started to feel like it was dragging behind me. The speed, the lack of jank, the way interactions felt more direct—it all clicked.

I eventually got to the point where if I’m editing code without Helix-style keybindings, it just doesn’t feel right anymore. That comfort, though, comes with a cost: I’m now very tied to Helix as an application. And while I really love Helix as an editor, I’ve started to feel like it’s not enough on its own.

Wanting deeper integration than Helix offers

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I need something more tightly integrated with what I’m developing than Helix currently is. There are ways to improve that—things like Yazelix are popular—but I don’t use Zellij. I use WezTerm, which I like quite a lot.

Since Yazi is already Lua-native, adding another layer on top of that doesn’t really feel correct to me. It starts to feel awkward, like too much scaffolding just to get things talking to each other. So I’m stuck wanting something that has the deep integration VS Code has, the editing experience Helix has, and the speed and lack of jank that Helix gets right.

Version control as a breaking point

On top of that, I really need better integration with version control than what Helix, VS Code, or even Zed currently provide. If you’re using Git, things are mostly fine, because everyone supports Git.

But I’m not using Git. I’m using Jujutsu. And I need my tools to understand how users actually interact with Jujutsu and to work nicely with that model. Right now, they just don’t. Weirdly, Helix almost wins here because it does nothing, which is sometimes better than doing the wrong thing.

Trying Zed and still feeling unsure

I don’t really know what the solution is. I’m trying Zed right now, and its Helix mode is okay. It’s definitely better than the Helix-mode extension for VS Code, which, when I tried it, brought the poor Chromium-based editor to its knees begging for forgiveness.

Still, I don’t really understand what Zed is giving me here, or what problem it’s actually solving for me.

Sitting with the uncertainty

At the end of it all, I just feel out of touch with my computer and with the software I write. I don’t know how much of that is about the tools themselves, and how much of it is about the way we’re building and using software right now.

I don’t know how much of it is simply that I need something that is Helix, but more than Helix, and that I don’t currently have it. I don’t know.