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.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-termThis 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 (cmd.exe) | xcopy /e /i runtime %AppData%\helix\runtime |
| Windows (PowerShell) | xcopy /e /i runtime $Env: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_RUNTIMEpath, it will automatically detect theruntimedirectory 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.
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).