(Neo)Vim has been one of the most popular editors for decades now and a lot of people have muscle memory for it. So every time I suggest someone tries Helix, if they’ve used or use (neo)vim or vim mode on other editors, they almost alway complain about the different keybindings being an impediment to them using the editor. So this is my attempt at trying to make the transition less painful by drawing parallels between Helix and Vim bindings.

The low-hanging fruits

Basic Motions

The main difference between Helix and Vim is that Helix is selection based and reverses the motions. A lot of the actions are actually the same. So for example de in Vim is ed in Helix, ce is ec and so on. The reason for this is that Helix selects text before doing anything with it.

You can think of the Helix binding as just Vim but entering visual mode before doing anything. So de would be ved and ce would be vec, the end result on Vim would be the exact same as what would happen on Helix.

Doing selections

A cursor in Helix is essentially a one character selection, so if you attempt to use dd or cc or yy or any other double verb to apply it to the entire line, it just won’t work. You have to do a selection before. Here’s the most common selections:

• x: select the current line (if you keep pressing it it’ll keep adding more lines to the selection)
• %: select the entire file
• e, E, b, B, w, W: essentially the same as in vim, select from the current cursor position until where they stop

Helix modes and macros

Macros

Macros can be recorded by pressing Q, then after you’ve done whatever you wanted to record, you can press Q again to stop. By default macros are recorded into the @ register, you can change where your macros are recorded if you want to store and use multiple macros. For example you could do "mQ to record a macro in a custom register m. "<register> is the syntax for changing registers.

You can also delete all macros by doing :clear-register. Registers can also be used to save your selection (text) so if you use d, y and so on, they’re also saved in registers. This also allows you to have multiple things saved at once by just changing the register before doing something.
Helix also has a few special registers. If you want to know more about registers you can check the documentation.

Space mode

Helix heavily relies on pickers to provide a lot of interactive features all of these can be accessed by pressing space:

• <space>b: Buffer picker
• <space>e: File explorer
• <space>s: Symbol search
• <space>/: Global search
• <space>d: LSP diagnostics
• <space>a: Code actions

Space mode has a few other features as well. You can check what else it can do here.

Goto mode

Moving around the file is very common. Vim users are used to using g to move around. Helix also has this keybinding.

Besides these, there’s other ways to move around, for example jumping around references, definitions, or between buffers, they all happen through the goto mode. One of the most useful ones for moving around is gw, this creates labels in your text that once you type them, your cursor jumps straight to where the label was.

If you want to learn more about gotos you can check the docs here

Window mode

Window mode allows you to manage splits in Helix, you can enter window mode with <space>w. Once in window mode, to create the splits you can use s for vertical splits and v for vertical splits. Then you can use window mode to manage your splits. Such as moving between them (using hjkl in window mode), swapping them (using HJKL),
You can change windows between vertical and horizontal using t (t stands for transpose), and you can quit the window with q.

Match mode

Match mode allows you to select text, in Vim you would usually use gi and ga for this, match mode is the Helix equivalent. To enter the window mode you can press m while in normal mode.

For example giw would be miw in helix (though for this case going back and forth or the other way around with the w, b and e keys is one less keystroke). If you’re inside of a () or a {} or some other pair and you have an LSP configured you can do mim to select everything inside of a pair or mam to select everything including the pair. If you don’t have an LSP or you want to match something else you can just type one of the pairs for example you could do mi( to match everything inside of a parenthesis.
You can also swap a (), {} or any pair with the syntax mr<original_pair><new_pair> so for () to {} you can do mr({. Or you could delete the pairs md(.

Command mode

Basic commands are mostly the same as in Vim. You can enter the command mode with :.

Common commands shared by Helix and Vim:

• :q: quit
• :q!: force quit
• :w: save
• :w!: force save
• :x: save and quit
• :|: pipe selection to command and substitute with command output
• :o/:open: open file

Common commands that are different:

• :!: required a space in helix as it’s an alias to :sh
• :lsp-restart: (re)start LSP
• :lsp-stop: stop LSP
• :log-open: read logs
• set-language: equivalent to :lang in Vim
• :format: format text with language formatter

Multicursors

Helix supports multiple cursors. These can be created by using <shift>C the cursors can be disabled with ,.

But the most powerful thing about it is being to spawn multiple cursors on certain locations based on their content. To do this you can do a selection of the region where you want the cursors to spawn then you press s and type what you’re looking for, after you’ve matched the content you can press enter and continue editing.

To disable a selection you can use ;.

If you want to learn more give the official docs a try. You might also want to try the helix tutor by running helix --tutor.