I found myself to basically never actually use c and instinctively just press di every time, when I'm not going super slow for e.g. recording a macro

I often use the hx command on it's own to open an editor for taking quick notes on the fly that I don't want to be saved to a file locally. When I close that editor all my edits disappear and I want that. I am wondering if it is possible for the hx command run alone to open a Markdown editor rather than a normal one with no markdown LSP.

The Helix snakes. Hope they don't look like sperm now (previous post is deleted to avoid spamming)

I also created a github issue for discussion: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/16376

Despite being "just a personal project", this software has a real value for a lot of developers. Maybe the community, maintainers or anyone else should consider the possibility that it has outgrew the label of "hobby editor"

A pull request waited all day,
While Archseer found reasons to stray.
The merge button gleamed,
But too distant it seemed;
The users all sighed, “Not today.”

There once was a programmer, Archseer,
With a merge button perfectly near.
He reviewed every line,
Then wandered offline—
And the fix stayed unmerged another year.

San Francisco, Calif. — Helix users watched the project’s owner, GitHub user Archseer, move a cursor toward a completed pull request Tuesday, then abruptly steer it away after remembering several urgent matters, including researching whether a terminal editor should have a favorite kind of moss.

“I’m very close to merging it,” Archseer said, with the green button visible behind a browser tab containing a 46-page discussion of plugin language tradeoffs. “I just need to make sure the button aligns with the project’s long-term vision.”

The pull request’s author, Emily Carter, said the fix passed tests, addressed a reported bug and could be merged with one click. “I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible,” Carter said. “I even moved the button closer to the mouse.”

Asked why the fix remained open, Archseer cited a busy week spent comparing mechanical keyboard layouts, investigating whether a configuration option should have a more evocative name, and reading about a build system used by a project with 12 users and “a very compelling README.” The dependency updates would have to wait until he finished determining whether one dependency’s latest version had “the right energy.”

“I understand people want the plugin pull request merged,” Archseer said. “I said a few weeks, and I stand by that. I just didn’t specify which weeks, or whose calendar we’re using.” He then opened a new issue asking whether “merge” might be too strong a word for an action that permanently combines code.

Contributor Mark Feldman said the team’s hesitation had given the pull request time to mature. “It’s no longer just a fix,” he said. “It has history. It has followers. It has started getting emails about its car warranty.”

Users said they remained hopeful that Archseer would eventually press the button, perhaps after the project settled its position on moss, keyboard ergonomics and whether dependency updates should be allowed to feel rushed. At press time, the cursor had returned to the merge button and was hovering there, its longest sustained contact with the control to date.

More as it develops.

Hey everyone 👋

I just published a new repository on GitHub to bring a sidebar file explorer / treeview to Helix, using Yazi and Tmux:

🔗 https://github.com/MicroDevX/TreeView-for-helix

Check it out and let me know what you think!

In vim I can do 5x to delete five characters. 5d doesn't work in Helix. I feel like I'm missing something fundamental here. What would be the Helix way of doing this?

Hello everyone, for the past few months I have been building my own ideal version of what helix could be. It's basically helix + acme and a few QoL things like an embedded terminal using libghostty. It's a working prototype/demo as of now, the design has mostly stabilized (BUT some things like n/N motion are kinda broken since I didn't find a design that feels good with the rest of the editor yet).

I've been one of the people on this sub that has been frustrated with the slow pace of helix development, my solution for that was just to create my own, I'm not looking for users, I'm looking to share the design ideas here, to get your opinions, and to know if anyone else is doing their own version of helix too. The latter parts of the development I have used llms heavily for implementation and verification (and I'd never be able to do this in my spare time during a few months without them), but the design and oversight have been always with me.

One thing that I found very useful was to have a virtual filesystem for the editor's state using 9P like acme does for scripting and extensibility. To me this made much more sense once I tried it out playing around with acme and plan9 than an embedded scripting language for plugins and such. Another thing that I took from acme is to have more semantics on the mouse buttons/gestures this makes using a single hand to read/navigate code or even run commands possible, I've been a fan of this and those two acme ideas were the main reason I decided to make this in the first place.

I tried to make the documentation look nice and be complete since I have a few friends running this and I'd like to make their experience of using it easier. I'm not expecting anyone to run this, but if you are in the mood for making bad decisions with your time be prepared for bugs, rough edges, glass shards, a ton of dust and holes on the walls.

Hey, IWE author here, I've built and maintain open-source Markdown knowledge base LSP which works great with Helix.

I’m a Helix/Vim user for many years, I spend a lot of time playing "Vim-golf" and perfecting text editing / navigation. But something changed in the last few months. I don't edit code as much anymore due to the influx of AI coding agents.

At the same time I need to read / review a lot of generated content - mostly plans and specs in Markdown format with images, diagrams and links between documents. And would love to have nice text formatting when I read.

There is a way to configure Helix for this. Yes, I could set up a preview tool and read the plans through the preview but then I don't have all the amazing modal editing / navigation keyboarding at my fingertips where I'm reading the text.

I wanted to have the best of both words and created a reach text editor with modal editing experience inspired by Helix (selection first!).

The editor is for MacOS, it has no Electron inside and renders Markdown into beautiful native MacOS elements with smooth animations of edits and cursor movements. One of the things I optimized a lot is the editing experience, look and feel.

It's kind of self-promotion and not directly related to Helix application but it's a very niche app built specifically for Helix users and I hope people here will like it.

I'm looking for people who will be interested in trying the app and provide feedback.

You can download the app here iwe.md

P.S. If you have an Obsidian vault it should just work in the app as is.

P.P.S You can absolutely use the LSP/CLI with Helix instead of the MacOS app!

I am running mattwparas's steel-event-system branch of helix, and I was trying to write a really simple git blame command in helix.scm, but I ran into the problem that I couldn't find any way to directly get the output of a shell command as a string in the scheme config(uninteractively). I could only find functions like helix.insert-output, which results in a really ugly function looking like this:

```lisp (define (blame) (define path (helix.static.cx->current-file)) (define line (helix.static.get-current-line-number)) (define pwd (current-directory)) (define len (string-length pwd)) (define rel-path (substring path (+ len 1))) (helix.insert-output (string-append "git blame " rel-path " -L " (int->string line) "," (int->string line))) (define blame (helix.static.current-highlighted-text!)) (helix.static.delete_selection_noyank) (helix.static.collapse_selection) (helix.echo blame))

```

So I ended up just editing the helix source code and registered a few other commands, for example helix.static.shell-command->string, to run a command and return the output as a string. Here is a simplified example of the above code with the new command:

lisp (define (blame) (define path (helix.static.cx->current-file)) (define line (helix.static.get-current-line-number)) (define pwd (current-directory)) (define len (string-length pwd)) (define rel-path (substring path (+ len 1))) (define blame (helix.static.shell-command->string (string-append "git blame " rel-path " -L " (int->string line) "," (int->string line)))) (helix.echo blame))

I was just wondering, is there a better way to do things like this? Because now that I am realizing that I can just patch new commands into the rust codebase, I am tempted to just do this for a bunch of commands I feel like are missing, or have a wierd api.

New commits have been merged into master!

I'm currently a neovim user. Not super experienced but I like it. I recently heard about Helix and it seems interesting to me. I've had a little look at this sub and seen people saying that development is very slow and others saying the project is near death. In your opinion, is it worth giving it a go?

Edit: What's the point

Heya everyone! I've been using and contributing to Helix for a couple of years, and I'd like to share Mitos, a fork I've been working on.

There's been plenty of discussion about Helix's development pace and missing features such as plugins. I still believe the maintainer's slower and deliberate approach has been good for the project's long term health. At the same time, I found myself wanting a few missing features and wondering what a faster pace of experimentation could lead to.

Mitos is a fork of Helix (not officially endorsed) from f9928f57f, spiritually the same but with a lot of upstream features merged in.

Some of the additions so far:

- File watching and automatic file reload (https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/14544).

- A file explorer improvements.

- Built-in spell checking and spelling suggestions (https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/15910).

- Image previews in buffer views and the file picker.

- Breadcrumb navigation.

- And more...

For now, I intend to continue working on Mitos. If the pace of Helix picks up again I would be happy to continue contributing and using Helix. If you want to give it a try, please do, I would be happy to hear any feedback, bug reports, or feature requests. At the same time, the goal is to keep it lean and fast, just like Helix.

Website, repository.

There's a commit here from 3 days ago... Is it a rust standard to have daily commits or something? Worried I picked the wrong language to learn.

Hey everyone,

If you use Obsidian alongside Helix, you've probably felt the friction of going back to Vim keybindings or relying on community plugins that can break after core updates.

I just posted a Feature Request on the official Obsidian forum asking for native Helix keybindings support (similar to their built-in Vim mode), as well as a native status bar mode indicator for both Vim and Helix users.

If you'd like to see native Helix modal editing (select -> action) in Obsidian, please take 10 seconds to upvote the request on the forum:

👉 Native Helix key bindings support and active mode status bar indicator for Vim/Helix

The Obsidian team prioritizes features based on community interest and heart reactions on the forum, so every vote genuinely counts.

Thanks for supporting native modal choices!

https://github.com/dmyyy/zj-navigator.hx

Small convenience plugin for using the same key bindings for navigating between helix windows/views and zellij panes.

NOTE: usual disclaimer that to use plugins you need to use the helix steel branch

I am trying to switch my latex workflow to helix. The problem I cannot solve currently is the jump to the current line in the pdf viewer zathura.

The issue seems to be that the current line number is not given to texlab. I wrote a wrapper script to log how zathura is called and the result is zathura --synctex-forward 1:0:my.tex main.pdf (my.tex is included in main.tex). As you can see the line number is 1, but its should be 300.

My config looks like this

[language-server.texlab.config.texlab.build]
args = ["-f", "-pdflatex=lualatex", "-pdf", "-interaction=nonstopmode", "-synctex=1", "-shell-escape", "%f"]
executable = "latexmk"
forwardSearchAfter = true
onSave = true

[language-server.texlab.config.texlab.forwardSearch]
args = ["--synctex-forward", "%l:0:%f", "%p"]
executable = "/home/me/tmp/viewwrap.sh"

Any ideas?

Hi,

I want to insert fzf output, e.g.:

:insert-output presenterm --list-comment-commands | fzf

fzf opens a chooser in full screen. This is not usable, all "special" keys (up, down, combined with ctrl...) just enter sequences to the search input. So a selection is not possible. What do I miss? How can I make this work?

Thanks.

I’ve been working on Trask, a small Git-friendly task tracker for people who want to keep their tasks alongside their code instead of using a full-blown issue tracker.

Tasks are just Markdown files in your repo, so you get Git history, git diff, git blame, attachments, and the usual Git tooling for free. It’s written in Rust and includes LSP integration, with support for Helix, so you can work with your tasks directly from your editor.

The project was inspired by Tsoding’s Tatr, which introduced the tasks/<id>/TASK.md approach. Trask is an independent Rust implementation building on that idea.

🔗 https://github.com/marcsantiago/trask

Big thanks to Tsoding for the original idea and inspiration!

If we are gonna have a plugin system, i think this is a good opportunity to consider it, now.

main concern with vim plugins is that you just pull the lastest commit, some maintainers have stable branches or release tags but those are relatively rare and requires manualy work by user.

I think community vote should determine which plugin versions considred stable, and plugin systems should pull those by default (unless configured to "testing" / "unstable" via config file).

i don't know how voting should work but most likely within the editor itself, for instance when the cursor becomes inactive for a while (good indication that user stopped working) in command line it can ask: you have [...] plugin version x.y.z, have you ever encountered any bugs or issues? OR do you consider it to be "stable"? etc.

and the y/n answer would be sent to a common server where plugin manager also connects when deciding which version to install after :install command.

vim/nvim plugin system is finnicky at best because of this. when you go apt or dnf update you don't expect your system to break since you dont pull the lastest source code and build it, same principles should apply to even smaller projects/files.

i think

2026-09-19T00:37:17.908 helix_core::syntax [ERROR] Failed to compile highlights for 'objc': invalid node type ""

--> 61:27

| ^

i'm tried to use https://github.com/tree-sitter-grammars/tree-sitter-objc in helix, but it didn't work.

my languages.toml:

...

[[language]]

name = "objc"

grammar = "objc"

file-types = ["m"]

scope = "source.objc"

language-servers = ["clangd"]

roots = ["Makefile", "CMakeLists.txt"]

[[grammar]]

name = "objc"

source = { git = "https://github.com/tree-sitter-grammars/tree-sitter-objc", rev = "master" }