Helix

Helix Cheat Sheet I am developing master of the Helix text editor. This document is notes relating to wrapping my head around some major paradigm shifts in learning a unique editor and in no way replaces the Helix documentation. With vim-like-editors, there are so many ways to do things, it is overwhelming. Be prepared to dedicate some time to get to know the editor. Start with the basic movement commands so you can at least move around. Then as you encounter situations where you think, “It would be nice if…”, there is probably a way to do it. Stop and add that new set of keystrokes to your arsenal. There are four primary editor modes in helix: command, normal, insert, and select. The mode is indicated in the lower left of the statusline at the bottom of the screen. The modes you see are: “INS”: insert mode; “SEL”: select mode; “NOR”: normal mode. Command mode doesn’t have a status indicator since these commands are executed directly. ...

To set up language support for helix, there are two things that need to be done. First, you will need to install the LSP language server for your desired language. Second, configure the language server in the languages.toml file. The language file is stored in ~/.config/helix/languages.toml Along the way, I started getting a TOML warning in languages.toml that my file was not set up correctly. In the end, moving all the [[languages]] sections above all the [language-server] items cleared up the issue. ...

Just happened to check on Helix to see whether there was any news about an update. To my pleasant surprise, version 25.07 was out. News Release Notes Change Log Source Code Releases Page Trying out the .deb installation package instead of the AppImage this time. Now off to explore the enhancements and improvements.

I am learning helix and as a side effect, I’m becoming more familiar with vim. I write myself notes as I practice different things. So, instead of keeping my notes to myself, thought I’d publish them. One of the main things that makes helix distinct from vim is the selection-first editing concept. Basically, you select some text and then you apply an action to the selected text. Select Entire File % Select whole file ...

I am trying out Helix as a CLI text editor. Helix is in the same vein as Neovim, but with some differences. Two differences I noticed right off between nvim and helix. Many of the basic vim motions key bindings are the same in helix. However, helix has a different philosophy behind key bindings. They use a selection -> action approach for compound bindings. An example of this is to delete the word at the cursor in normal node. ...