helix/README.md
2021-06-02 17:05:15 +02:00

2.5 KiB

Helix

Build status

Screenshot

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).

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:

Getting help

Discuss the project on the community Matrix channel.