Looking for input regarding finding an IDE (spoilers: involves Emacs and Vim)

Which does beg the question why the others haven't implemented such functionality (yet)?

Helix continues the work previously done by Kakoune (some people prefer Kakoune over Helix anyway). As to why - because it, like any other computer science topic, is a topic of active research, and Kakoune is the next generation of research into modal editing. Disclaimer: I use Neovim because it works well enough for me (it does offer more configurability, but I doubt I use it that much) and I don't want to learn another set of hotkeys (which is similar enough, but still different).

I shouldn't expect remote accessing some random server will allow me to use Helix, right?

That's right, but as a Neovim user, it's hard for me to use Vi, because it lacks many features, and I don't know which ones. When you start going from basic to advanced knowledge, it sadly doesn't translate. Of course, I would still pick Vi over Nano any day.

There's a similar problem with many shells (fish, readline (bash)) that don't fully implement Vim's features, so their Vi mode sucks, but I still use it.

I shouldn’t expect remote accessing some random server will allow me to use Helix, right? Is there any other way to make this work? Or…, should I just learn both Vim and Helix’ Vim + Kakoune amalgamation?

That all depends on the server in question and if you can install things onto it or not. Some points to consider though:

• If the server is restrictive on what you can install then you likely are stuck with basic vim or worst only vi - and without all your configs it is a very different beast of an editor anyway and something you will need to get used to everytime you jump on the server.
• If you can install stuff to your home drive then it is quite easy to get helix running - it is a single binary with some language assets (requires one env var to point to them). So is trivial to get working from your home dir without a package manager.
• IMO you should not be editing things on a server often enough to worry too much about what editors it has on it. Ideally with things like ansible you should not need an editor on it at all.

Vim is literally ubiquitous and plugins that enable its features can be found on almost any ‘platform’. It’s unrealistic to expect Helix’ adoption to be at that rate (yet). However, would you happen to know if at least the likes of VS Code and/or Jetbrains’ IDEs support it? And if so, how good their support/implementation is?

Do you mean vi input mode in other editors? That is one downside - you wont find it anywhere yet. Though since learning it I have not needed to go back to other IDEs like VS Code or Jetbrains, WIth inbuilt LSP support its language integration is just as good as VS Codes as it is working off the same essential language servers. Though it does seem that at least vscode has a plugin for kakoune keybindings which are more similar to helixs.

Though what you will find is a lot of the keys are very similar between vi and helix, so apart from the big action > movement vs selection > action and a few other things they dont feel too dissimilar from each other (things like basic movement, ie w for word, e for end of word, or text objects are essentially the same).

I kinda do for how ubiquitous Vim keybindings are.

Yeah, that’s a great reason to stick with it. It’s unfortunate that nothing really has Kakoune bindings other than Kakoune.

I think preference is generally subjective.

Of course, I know preference is subjective. That’s why I didn’t say “it’s better” :P Could very well be that vim works better for you.

The big reason I like them more is the concept of selections. Basically instead of a cursor you have a set of selections with start and end position (which could be the same position for a normal cursor), instead of having the object to delete as a parameter. For example, to delete two words it’s ‘d2w’ in vim, while it’s ’2wd’ in Kakoune. And after you type the ‘2w’, the selection shows what you’re about to delete, because it’s a separate command. It’s more useful when you’re operating on larger blocks of text, of course, or chain multiple commands together to create the selection you want. Sure, you can use visual mode in vim but it feels like an afterthought in a lot of ways.

I’ve already mentioned it but you can also have multiple selections at the same time, which I don’t think vim really does (I could be wrong though). This makes bulk operations really easy since they work exactly the same as operations on a single selection. For example, if you want to prepend let’s say “foo” to the next 10 lines, in Kakoune it would be ‘9CIfoo’ where C creates a selection one line under the current one, and I works the same as in vim. I believe you’d have to use macros for that in vim, something like ‘qqIfoojq9@q’.

Those two are I think the main reasons I like Kakoune.

Doesn’t that disrupt muscle memory?

I haven’t really had problems with it, at least. Maybe because I’ve used vim for a long time before Kakoune. TBH I also don’t really use vim a lot anymore except on one remote machine that isn’t mine.