I was reading some opinions and blogs about helix and thought it's really cool, gave it a try, and almost immediately switched back to vim. It was the moment when I tried to use some regex substitution and as it turns out there are no regex matchgroup substitutions in helix. You can't easily do stuff like replace all occurences of a pattern "firstword secontword: thirdword" with "thirdword - firstword" for example. At first I thought that I'm just new to this editor and don't know how it's done, then after searching for a while found that helix doesn't try to implement things that can be done by external tools, and the way to go is pipe your selections (or entire buffer contents) to sed or awk or whatever and and read from their stdout back into your file (?).

So, while it feels more unix-way (why have regex substitutions when you can pipe into tools that already do this), I still like that vim has this builtin, it feels more integrated into the tool probably. At this point, if helix doesn't want to implement things other tools can do, why even have regex search and select? This could be done by piping into grep as well, I think. Anyway, just my silly opinion and my experience with helix is that I can't use it without regex match groups and substitutions and I'm too lazy to learn how to pipe into sed and do this properly in helix, and it feels natural to me that vim has this builtin with a great amount of advanced options and features.

Like, for example, in vim you can do regex searching and tell vim which part of the match should be your final selection. It's incredible how powerful regexes in vim are.