Many of these features are more IDE than editor to me and that perhaps explains our different points of view.

Personally I’d be quite sad if the core Helix editor ends up like a VS Code style IDE, or even like some of the more heavyweight vim/emacs configs I’ve seen. I prefer simple, lightweight tools with relatively narrow focus and for me there’s not a lot in that bucket missing from Helix.

I use panes in my terminal for e.g. quickly running commands and file management, and terminal tabs for e.g. quickly switching to gitui/lazygit or longer terminal and command sessions.

I prefer this because all the pane and tab management, file management tools, etc. are therefore the same whether I’m editing code or doing something else in the terminal.

Of course, once there are plugins, hopefully people who want those things from their editor can be catered for too.