Comment by tpmoney

As someone who spent some time over the last few years working through trying to daily drive neovim, helix, emacs, and nano, the out of the box experience with helix is far and away the best experience of them. The defaults are very well chosen. Additionally the contextual help and hints are very good for helping you use and remember commands you don't use often. I also personally found that helix's order of operations for commands to make a lot more sense to my brain compared to vim's.

Part of it for me is that I really don't like the massive plugin / config wall that is the modern neovim/spacemacs experience. I truly appreciate the extensibility and the fact that those plugins allow for things helix just can't do right now (e.g. emacs is effectively the IDE for any lisp language and you can't load up a repl in helix). But the problem with that becomes not only do I need to learn the application itself, but now I need to learn a whole bunch of plugins, and often learn about the differences between them because everyone has their own preferences in combinations, so looking up how to do something covered by a plugin often leads you to multiple incompatible answers. And even if you bite the bullet on trying to build your own config from scratch (which I did with emacs) you're still often just taking on faith other people's recommendations on stuff, or spending a lot of time learning about a plugin to make a decision and that time is time you're not spending on whatever you want to be doing.

Helix benefits from being new and not carrying generations of legacy decisions behind it. As a result, helix can make decisions and defaults that fit "modern" expectations. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also probably what I would recommend for someone "new to the TUI" as a place to start when you just need something with a good chunk of modern conveniences and don't want to spend the next few weeks getting the editor configured.