Author here. I listen to feedback, but it's hard to incorporate every possible requested feature without the codebase becoming an unmaintainable mess.
We're a small team with limited time and I've always emphasized that helix is just one version of a tool and it's perfectly fine if there's a better alternative for some users. Someone with a fully customized neovim setup is probably going to have a better time just using their existing setup rather than getting helix to work the same way.
Code editors in particular are very subjective and helix started as a project to solve my workflow. But users don't always respond well to having feature requests rejected because they don't align with our goals. Plugins should eventually help fit those needs.
We can't invert the bindings though (wd -> dw) because that would require a big internal change to add operator pending mode:
When you press `d` in vim, that enters the operator pending mode, where it will wait for an object to be specified, in this case `w` and then delete it.
In a selection first model, `d` is very simple: it just always deletes the selection. So you select a word, then delete.
A tree-sitter grammar is slightly more complex but it has a bunch of benefits! Syntax highlighting is more correct, faster and a bunch of smart features like indentation and folding, bracket matching can be built on top of it.
If the bindings were the same, then what's the point? We're not a "vim ported to rust", instead we got our own take on things. (from the vision doc: "Don't try to be everything for everyone. There are many great editors out there to choose from. Let's make Helix one of those great options, with its own take on things.")
> helix wants to get much wider adoption
I've stated this before: I just want to make a good editor that I like using daily. There's a growing community of users with similar preferences that are very happy with it, but I'm not aiming to corner the market -- this isn't a startup. Much in the same way as vim isn't trying to become more like VSCode to increase it's market share.
That said, thanks for giving it a try! For keybinds, we do have a couple of guides:
Well it's similar in vim: if I press `d` accidentally and I don't notice, then any subsequent movement commands will start to modify the file. It's a bit more explicit in Helix since you'll see a visual selection being made. Luckily in both editors you can undo the change :)