Building from source
Requirements:
Clone the Helix GitHub repository into a directory of your choice. The
examples in this documentation assume installation into either ~/src/
on
Linux and macOS, or %userprofile%\src\
on Windows.
- The Rust toolchain
- The Git version control system
- A C++14 compatible compiler to build the tree-sitter grammars, for example GCC or Clang
If you are using the musl-libc
standard library instead of glibc
the following environment variable must be set during the build to ensure tree-sitter grammars can be loaded correctly:
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=-crt-static"
-
Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/helix-editor/helix cd helix
-
Compile from source:
cargo install --path helix-term --locked
This command will create the
hx
executable and construct the tree-sitter grammars in the localruntime
folder.
💡 If you do not want to fetch or build grammars, set an environment variable
HELIX_DISABLE_AUTO_GRAMMAR_BUILD
💡 Tree-sitter grammars can be fetched and compiled if not pre-packaged. Fetch grammars with
hx --grammar fetch
and compile them withhx --grammar build
. This will install them in theruntime
directory within the user's helix config directory (more details below).
Configuring Helix's runtime files
Linux and macOS
The runtime directory is one below the Helix source, so either export a
HELIX_RUNTIME
environment variable to point to that directory and add it to
your ~/.bashrc
or equivalent:
export HELIX_RUNTIME=~/src/helix/runtime
Or, create a symbolic link:
ln -Ts $PWD/runtime ~/.config/helix/runtime
If the above command fails to create a symbolic link because the file exists either move ~/.config/helix/runtime
to a new location or delete it, then run the symlink command above again.
Windows
Either set the HELIX_RUNTIME
environment variable to point to the runtime files using the Windows setting (search for
Edit environment variables for your account
) or use the setx
command in
Cmd:
setx HELIX_RUNTIME "%userprofile%\source\repos\helix\runtime"
💡
%userprofile%
resolves to your user directory likeC:\Users\Your-Name\
for example.
Or, create a symlink in %appdata%\helix\
that links to the source code directory:
Method | Command |
---|---|
PowerShell | New-Item -ItemType Junction -Target "runtime" -Path "$Env:AppData\helix\runtime" |
Cmd | cd %appdata%\helix mklink /D runtime "%userprofile%\src\helix\runtime" |
💡 On Windows, creating a symbolic link may require running PowerShell or Cmd as an administrator.
Multiple runtime directories
When Helix finds multiple runtime directories it will search through them for files in the following order:
runtime/
sibling directory to$CARGO_MANIFEST_DIR
directory (this is intended for developing and testing helix only).runtime/
subdirectory of OS-dependent helix user config directory.$HELIX_RUNTIME
- Distribution-specific fallback directory (set at compile time—not run time—
with the
HELIX_DEFAULT_RUNTIME
environment variable) runtime/
subdirectory of path to Helix executable.
This order also sets the priority for selecting which file will be used if multiple runtime directories have files with the same name.
Note to packagers
If you are making a package of Helix for end users, to provide a good out of
the box experience, you should set the HELIX_DEFAULT_RUNTIME
environment
variable at build time (before invoking cargo build
) to a directory which
will store the final runtime files after installation. For example, say you want
to package the runtime into /usr/lib/helix/runtime
. The rough steps a build
script could follow are:
export HELIX_DEFAULT_RUNTIME=/usr/lib/helix/runtime
cargo build --profile opt --locked --path helix-term
cp -r runtime $BUILD_DIR/usr/lib/helix/
cp target/opt/hx $BUILD_DIR/usr/bin/hx
This way the resulting hx
binary will always look for its runtime directory in
/usr/lib/helix/runtime
if the user has no custom runtime in ~/.config/helix
or HELIX_RUNTIME
.
Validating the installation
To make sure everything is set up as expected you should run the Helix health check:
hx --health
For more information on the health check results refer to Health check.
Configure the desktop shortcut
If your desktop environment supports the
XDG desktop menu
you can configure Helix to show up in the application menu by copying the
provided .desktop
and icon files to their correct folders:
cp contrib/Helix.desktop ~/.local/share/applications
cp contrib/helix.png ~/.icons # or ~/.local/share/icons
To use another terminal than the system default, you can modify the .desktop
file. For example, to use kitty
:
sed -i "s|Exec=hx %F|Exec=kitty hx %F|g" ~/.local/share/applications/Helix.desktop
sed -i "s|Terminal=true|Terminal=false|g" ~/.local/share/applications/Helix.desktop