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.

Now copy the runtime/ directory somewhere. Helix will by default look for the runtime inside the config directory or the same directory as executable, but that can be overriden via the HELIX_RUNTIME environment variable.

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

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"

Arch Linux

There are two packages available from AUR:

helix-bin: contains prebuilt binary from GitHub releases
helix-git: builds the master branch of this repository

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).