I fully expect Helix to replace Vim, Neovim, and Kakoune for most users in the long run.

Helix is built from the ground up around Tree-Sitter and LSP. This means you get the best syntax highlighting available, and IDE-like functionality, with zero configuration required other than installing the appropriate language server.

Those are by far the most important features for a text editor to have, and crucially, they are fully integrated into Helix, but are an afterthought in (Neo)vim and Kakoune. The quality difference is obvious the moment you try it side by side. Nothing else really matters. Vim's and Kakoune's syntax highlighting is terrible, and while Neovim can now use Tree-Sitter as well, there always seem to be some additional hoops the user needs to jump through in order to get it to work. Not so with Helix.

Regrettably, Helix has inherited Vim's worst design flaw, namely being unusable with non-English keyboard layouts, but all other Vim derivatives share this flaw as well so I don't see that stopping Helix from steamrolling the competition once it matures and the word spreads.

I just can't see if ever taking off, if I'm honest. The people that use neo/vim are going to continue using it, even if Helix is better. The people who aren't yet using it will use vs-code and the few that do switch, well they might go to Helix but there's a lot of vim resources out there, so I'm not sure all of them will go to Helix.

Honestly, language servers are a bit of a faff to set up, but that's tooling and it's getting easier and easier to get these installed now. I expect that will continue.

> I just can't see if ever taking off, if I'm honest. The people that use neo/vim are going to continue using it, even if Helix is better.

I would think that helix probably is better because I'm certain that the verb->text object paradigm in vim could be much better. It may in fact make more sense to do the 'text object' first like it seems to do in both helix and kakoune. But is it better enough for me to switch off something that I've used for years now? Only if it sees mass adoption and you see many developers adopting it. Like if you see it in VS Code as an option to use helix bindings, then it is probably safe to consider adopting it.

> Honestly, language servers are a bit of a faff to set up, but that's tooling and it's getting easier and easier to get these installed now. I expect that will continue.

I've been pleasantly surprised with how much better LSP setup in neovim has gotten, as I've transitioned over to the native LSP from CoC, which is also excellent. It's still not pain-free to setup, but it's much easier than it was and I suspect you're right that it'll continue to get easier... though I doubt it'll get anywhere close to how easy VS Code is to use any time soon.

There had previously been fragmented plugins (williamboman/nvim-lsp-installer was Mason's predecessor and is a good example) that solved the problem of installation and management for each of these. With Mason, I feel that the story for managing different language environments has jumped to be extremely close to VSCode's extensions.