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.
- 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.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
.
Helix also needs it's runtime files so make sure to copy/symlink the runtime/
directory into the
config directory (for example ~/.config/helix/runtime
on Linux/macOS). This location can be overriden
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 theruntime
directory in the project root.
Helix can be installed on MacOS through homebrew via:
brew tap helix-editor/helix
brew install helix
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!
, orerror!
. (log::info!("helix!")
) - Pass the appropriate verbosity level option for the desired log level. (
hx -v <file>
for info, morev
s for higher severity inclusive)
- Print using
- 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.
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).