#HelixEditor

Spent the last couple days learning #HelixEditor as a contrast to my #emacs maximalist tendencies.

I managed to crash it once so far, with an out of bound Rope slice, but otherwise I am impressed with how much I can do with it even without plug-ins or a scripting language.

I especially like the match mode and the tree-sitter based movement.

I am now building #HelixEditor for myself, on master, as recommended by @clementd.

First, in my environment I set`export HELIX_RUNTIME="~/.config/helix/runtime"`. I then followed the build directions at https://docs.helix-editor.com/building-from-source.html. I fetched and built the grammars as described there.

Something **not** mentioned in those directions was that I had to copy from the source directory themes and queries into the runtime path I mentioned above. Maybe there are other things I need to copy that I haven’t noticed yet.

The binary ended up in ~/.cargo/bin/hx.

I don’t know if what I built is optimized.

TIL Helix has global search now with `SPACE + /`. Now I don't need to use ripgrep outside the editor!

Swoon!

#HelixEditor

I’m really starting to love #HelixEditor so much. It’s now my daily driver. It’s frustrating to me when it falls down. I’m going to make myself a list of those things I want that don’t work, what issues or discussions have been filed about them, and what work is being done on them.

I’m also going to start running nightlies (if that’s a thing) or my own builds.

It’s lovely how easy #RustLang projects are to build. Thank you, #Cargo.

So it does look like the TypeScript language server has a limit of 4MB source size where it disables type checking (and actually shows an erroneous error stating that exports that exist in the file do not exist) for files that are imported but not open in the current workspace/session.

Still not sure if this is documented anywhere or not (haven’t been able to find it, if it is).

99.99999% of the time, unless you’re doing niche stuff like I am, you won’t run into this.

Workaround: should you have such a large file, e.g., with a large generated object, try and refactor to split it up into multiple files and rejoin it a separate file. The actual object size/memory usage isn’t the issue, it’s the file size.

https://github.com/typescript-language-server/typescript-language-server/issues/951#issuecomment-2786000876

#TypeScript #max #lines #memory #constant #object #import #bug #issue #LSP #languageServer #HelixEditor #VSCode #JavaScript #microsoft #workaround

Right, well, I can reproduce it with a simple example so I just filed a bug. Let’s see if it’s a known issue/limitation or what.

https://github.com/typescript-language-server/typescript-language-server/issues/951

Screen recording showing the issue:

https://vimeo.com/1073284447?share=copy#t=0

#TypeScript #max #lines #memory #constant #object #import #bug #issue #LSP #languageServer #HelixEditor #VSCode #JavaScript #microsoft

@galdor I see your point, and idiom in #RustLang agrees with you. Import such that at the call-site you say `module.identifier()`.

On the one side (the side that disagrees with you), my IDE typically tells me where naked `identifier` is defined (either #PyCharm or #HelixEditor in my case); and it’s the most common case in #Python code I have read (and I’ve been programming in Python for decades).

On the other side you’re not always hovering as you read over big blocks of code. Naming the origin module is informative.

In the middle, it’s not needed for a lot of things, especially stdlib and common packages. It seems like a fine line and I’m not quite certain what the best behavior is.

OMG, #HelixEditor def has some amazing new updates..

Global search is just perfect now.. thank you! So glad I support this project

This is a great introductory blog post about the Helix modal editor. It's also been my first choice for over a year now. I am really looking forward to the Steel plugin system, though. I don't think I need a lot of plugins, but one or two would certainly be on my wish list.

https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2025-03-16-helix-review.html

#HelixEditor #Helix

I created a crib sheet for the #Helix text editor:

https://www.bobulous.org.uk/coding/Helix-crib-sheet.html

Best viewed on a big screen.

As usual I intended the new page to be compact and concise; and as usual it ended up being huge and rambling. Hopefully it'll still be of use to people who aren't fully familiar with the most useful keys and commands. (And just maybe of vague interest to #Neovim users who are thinking about trying Helix.)

Let me know if you spot anything incorrect.

#HelixEditor #FOSS #RustLang

Hey my fellow Helix users.. I’m at a loss here so help me out!

Is there any keybind to cycle LSP code completions for a method with multiple parameter versions like in C++?

Example:

QWidget->setFocus()

Gives me an auto-complete with one result:

setFocus() -> void (1/2)

How do I cycle through these two?
The normal tab/shift tab do nothing, neither does ctrl-p/n nor up/down

#helix #helixEditor #lsp #keybinds #help

@samurro ah .. I'm not a plugin guy but I use quite a few of them though. Definitely thanks for the hint about #HelixEditor !

Oh another pluginmanager for #neovim has bitten the dust, and I totally not noticed. #packer #nvim
I finally want to get rid of this bullshit and use #HelixEditor everywhere...looking at you #Debian

Starting to get used to the terminal based #HelixEditor by the simple expedient of not installing #SublimeText on this machine (so that I don't have access to my usual local GUI alternative).

Have also configured “bat” (colourful version of the cat command) to use the same colour scheme as the editor.

Finally gave #HelixEditor a legitimate try today for #RustLang tinkering and I'm digging it. All my previous attempts stalled from friction with my vim-stincts. This time I decided to focus on polishing the tooling experience and that's made a huge difference in how comfortable I am. I really like the inline diagnostics that were added recently, for example. Context: I used to be a big Spacemacs (evil mode!) person and went to VSCode cause it was easy and supported what I needed. I've missed a solid terminal only experience outside of plain old vim. Now I have one, kudos to the hx team.

Is there a way to run the Javascript LSP in #helix without showing all the type annotations?

Update: Got it. I was able to set:

[editor.lsp]
display-inlay-hints = false

Took care of all of them. Looks like there are ways to turn this on per language, so I'll need to tinker more.

#helixeditor

@dcz I selected a handful. Even though I have almost a decade of experience using vim. The “powerful” features like macros and other things were too obtuse and required too much thinking before seeing results of the changes. Other commands are just not discoverable unless I take time to do tutorials.

I switched to #HelixEditor probably 3 years ago and the multi-selection is way more powerful For Me (others may argue it’s less powerful than macros) because I actually use it without needing to think upfront what my actions need to be. I can see what’s happening to the selections live! Also the same defaults, and which-key like helpful popups are helpful for discovery.

@blainsmith Guess that means I'm back to daily-driving master #HelixEditor

Just updated #Makedeb PKGBUILD for #HelixEditor 25.01.1 for #Debian stable.
https://github.com/akhilman/makedeb-helix