Helix

A kakoune / neovim inspired editor, written in Rust.

The editing model is very heavily based on kakoune; during development I found myself agreeing with most of kakoune’s design decisions.

For more information, see the website or documentation.

All shortcuts/keymaps can be found in the documentation on the website

Features

• Vim-like modal editing
• Multiple selections
• Built-in language server support
• Smart, incremental syntax highlighting and code editing via tree-sitter

It’s a terminal-based editor first, but I’d like to explore a custom renderer (similar to emacs) in wgpu or skulpin.

Installation

Note: Only certain languages have indentation definitions at the moment. Check runtime/<lang>/ for indents.toml.

We provide packaging for various distributions, but here’s a quick method to build from source.

git clone --recurse-submodules --shallow-submodules -j8 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix
cd helix
cargo install --path helix-term

This will install the hx binary to $HOME/.cargo/bin.

Helix also needs it’s runtime files so make sure to copy/symlink the runtime/ directory into the config directory (for example ~/.config/helix/runtime on Linux/macOS). This location can be overriden via the HELIX_RUNTIME environment variable.

Packages already solve this for you by wrapping the hx binary with a wrapper that sets the variable to the install dir.

NOTE: running via cargo also doesn’t require setting explicit HELIX_RUNTIME path, it will automatically detect the runtime directory in the project root.

Alternatively, if you want to embed the runtime/ directory into the Helix binary you can build it with:

cargo install --path helix-term --features "embed_runtime"

MacOS

Helix can be installed on MacOS through homebrew via:

brew tap helix-editor/helix
brew install helix

Contributing

Contributors are very welcome! No contribution is too small and all contributions are valued.

Some suggestions to get started:

• You can look at the good first issue label on the issue tracker.
• Help with packaging on various distributions needed!
• To use print debugging to the ~/.cache/helix/helix.log file, you must:
  • Print using log::info!, warn!, or error!. (log::info!("helix!"))
  • Pass the appropriate verbosity level option for the desired log level. (hx -v <file> for info, more vs for higher severity inclusive)
• If your preferred language is missing, integrating a tree-sitter grammar for it and defining syntax highlight queries for it is straight forward and doesn’t require much knowledge of the internals.

We provide an architecture.md that should give you a good overview of the internals.

Getting help

Discuss the project on the community Matrix Space (make sure to join #helix-editor:matrix.org if you’re on a client that doesn’t support Matrix Spaces yet).