In fairness Helix provides a lot of functionality out of the box and features are gradually being added all the time. The lack of plugin system is not a problem for many people, and I’d rather they take their time and get it right. I certainly don’t think it’s the case that they’re “trying” and failing to implement plugins - it’s clearly going to happen when the time is right.
Big fan of helix and am in this camp. Used to have a bunch of plugins for neovim, but in Helix, honestly just haven't felt the need for anything besides what it comes with. It's a great editor.
I think you only miss (or at least I noticed this happened to me) a plugin system when you've engaged with the programmable side of your editor and then have to use one that isn't. I dont use/try to stay away from using (neo)vim plugins but I do like to pull out repetitive things into little snippets. I have things to manage my clipboard, pull up manpages in another editor tab when I put my cursor over a command and press a key in terminal mode, and a scattering of other quick useful tools. A lot of it's not reasonable to upstream, so it's a bit frustrating to me personally to use stuff that isn't programmable.
I've also toyed with emacs in the past and think I could like it for this reason, but ironically most other programming editors don't seem to be committed to the user's abilities as a programmer. I don't think it's nearly as easy/accessible/encouraged to program vscode, for instance. Self-documenting programmable programs like vim and emacs are so magical--- I hope they never go out of fashion.
I think a big missing piece with writing what you want in Rust and recompiling the editor to activate your changes is that you're not able to work with it _live_. That is, I can use the vim (or nvim or emacs) GUI/text processing/IO/etc facilities interactively as I'm writing my snippets to see if everything works the way I expected. I can send lines/expressions to the lua/elisp compiler running in the editor that I'm _currently using to write the program_ to change how it works, _on the fly_. It's an integrated programming experience in a way that very few things are--- it's not just about programmability, but this circular thing that goes on with editors that really fully commit to it.
