Helix

Helix is a text editor run in the terminal. Helix also works in the TTY. It is inspired by Vim and Kakoune text editors. Helix can be run from the terminal with the hx command. Some Linux distributions provide Helix with the helix command. Helix’s editing philosophy is selection -> action, prioritizing safety through text verification before specifying an action.

Installation

Because Helix is evolving quickly, the way Helix can be installed can evolve to. To see how to install Helix, follow the Helix documentation book article about installing Helix. Helix can be installed on Debian using an AppImage¹. Download the official Helix AppImage from the Helix latest releases page.

First move the Helix image to a directory inside the $PATH variable:

sudo mv helix-*.AppImage /usr/local/bin/hx

Then change it to an executable using chmod:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/hx

Helix can be run now with the hx command if the /usr/local/bin/ directory is listed in the $PATH variable.

Configuration

Helix relies on two primary configuration files: config.toml for general configuration and languages.toml for Language Server Protocol (LSP) configuration. Due to built-in functionality, Helix’s configurations files are typically short. It is recommended to include the config.toml and languages.toml files inside the dotfiles repository for backup.

Operating System	Configuration directory
Linux, macOS	`~/.config/helix/`
Windows	`C:\Users\<user>\%AppData%\Roaming\helix\`

<user> is the username of the user that wants to configure Helix.

Clipboard

Helix can copy to the system clipboard with Space + y. When running Wayland as a desktop environment, make sure to install wl-clipboard:

sudo apt install wl-clipboard

Otherwise, when running Xorg as a desktop environment, make sure to install xclip:

sudo apt install xclip

Find and replace

Press s to search for specific text in the selected area. After pressing Enter every instance of the target text can be replaced by pressing r and entering a new value.

Commands

Use :reflow to hard-wrap text at the width (configuration name = ‘rulers: []’) specified in the languages.toml configuration file.
Helix can sort the current selection by running :pipe sort²