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.

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 Rust and Golang have indentation definitions at the moment.

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 same folder as the executable, but that can be overriden via the HELIX_RUNTIME environment variable.

NOTE: You should set this to /runtime in development (if running via cargo).

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

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!
• 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.

Usage

Keyboard shortcuts / Keymap

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

• https://docs.helix-editor.com/keymap.html

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).