They told you to use “ed”

You missed the joke

I really want to switch from VSCode to Helix but not having a file tree is a deal breaker.

Luckily there’s been a lot of work on adding a plugin runtime with one of the proof-of-concept plugins being a file tree. Assuming the plugin runtime comes out this year in a helix release, and adding on a year for the community to settle on the first wave of plugins while giving them time to mature, I can see myself using helix fulltime in 2027 (before Microsoft has enshitified vscode enough to be unpleasant to use).

For a complicated project I get it, github’s PR system is kind of bad (horrible branch based workflow and no stacked diff support resulting in increased churn) compared to the alternatives.

That’s why we have tools like Graphite to add stacked diff support on top of github, and other devs creating new VCSs because git still hasn’t made it’s interactive rebase and merge conflicts easy enough to handle for juniors and it should be simpler.