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.

Troubleshooting

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.

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

Installation

Packages are available for various distributions (see Installation docs).

If you would like to build from source:

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

This will install the hx binary to $HOME/.cargo/bin and build tree-sitter grammars. If you want to customize your languages.toml config, tree-sitter grammars may be manually fetched and built with hx --grammar fetch and hx --grammar build.

Helix also needs its runtime files so make sure to copy/symlink the runtime/ directory into the config directory (for example ~/.config/helix/runtime on Linux/macOS, or %AppData%/helix/runtime on Windows).

OS	command
windows	`xcopy runtime %AppData%/helix/runtime`
linux/macos	`ln -s $PWD/runtime ~/.config/helix/runtime`

This location can be overridden 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.

In order to use LSP features like auto-complete, you will need to install the appropriate Language Server for a language.

MacOS

Helix can be installed on MacOS through homebrew via:

brew tap helix-editor/helix
brew install helix

Contributing

Contributing guidelines can be found here.

Getting help

Your question might already be answered on the FAQ.