Could you give an example of an edit you couldn’t express?

Say I am at the last line of a part of a function, that I would like to delete - maybe some debug output. In VIM, I will look at the relative line numbers and immediately see that I would like to delete up to the number 8. Then I simply write d8<up> or d8h, and I am done.

As far as I can tell - I may be wrong - in Helix, I would have to first do 8<up> and then 9xd. Note the number 9 in there. This is due to the fact that in Helix, I have to count the number of lines I want to delete, rather than just being able to look at the relative line numbers.

In Helix you'd have to x downward or use v to enter visual mode. But you initially said that you "found kakoune bindings limiting". In kakoune you can 8Kxd, or 8K<a-x>d on less recent versions. The vim approach is usually superior for simple commands like "delete N lines", the kakoune approach is superior when you want to compose commands, e.g. `%sif<ret>f(<a-i>(sand<ret>cor` is "select all `if`, find `(`, select inside `(`, select all `and`, change to `or`"

Legit. You can do nicer than that in Helix’s defaults, but you're right that it won't match d-8-up’s concision: instead of 8-up-9-x-d ("8-move up-9-select whole lines below-delete"), you can do v-9-up-x-d, ("select-9-this line and above-the whole lines-delete").

If you're asking about what helix can do in general, though, as opposed to just the defaults, you can configure it to:

  - use relative line numbering
  - map a key (say, capital X) to the opposite of x’s behavior — or even better, to `[“extend_line_up”, “extend_to_line_bounds”]` ; the latter won't "eat" the first press by using it to select the current line.
  - make the same tweak to lowercase x

Combined, that will get you back to 8-X-d (“8-select whole lines up from here-delete”) to delete up through where you can see 8 in the gutter (and 8-x-d in the other direction).

Thank you for the great answer. I did not know that. I will try it out.

In Helix, you can use `maf` to mark the outer function and then press `d` to delete it.

Agreed, but more often, I find myself in a situation, where I just want to delete, comment, or yank a few lines of a function, so I find that going by relative line numbers is a lot more flexible and useful for me.