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

• 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.

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 in ./runtime/grammars.

Helix 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).

Starting with Windows Vista you can also create symbolic links on Windows. Note that this requires elevated priviliges - i.e. PowerShell or Cmd must be run as administrator.

PowerShell:

New-Item -ItemType SymbolicLink -Target "runtime" -Path "$Env:AppData\helix\runtime"

Cmd:

cd %appdata%\helix
mklink /D runtime "<helix-repo>\runtime"

The runtime location can be overridden via the HELIX_RUNTIME environment variable.

NOTE: if HELIX_RUNTIME is set prior to calling cargo install --path helix-term, tree-sitter grammars will be built in $HELIX_RUNTIME/grammars.

If you plan on keeping the repo locally, an alternative to copying/symlinking runtime files is to set HELIX_RUNTIME=/path/to/helix/runtime (HELIX_RUNTIME=$PWD/runtime if you're in the helix repo directory).

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.

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.

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

If installing from source, to use Helix in desktop environments that supports XDG desktop menu, including Gnome and KDE, copy the provided .desktop file to the correct folder:

cp contrib/Helix.desktop ~/.local/share/applications

To use another terminal than the default, you will need to 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

Please note: there is no icon for Helix yet, so the system default will be used.

Helix can be installed on MacOS through homebrew:

brew install helix

Contributing guidelines can be found here.

Your question might already be answered on the FAQ.

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).