A Walkthrough on Helix — A Post-Modern Modal Text Editor

A walkthrough on the Helix editor.

alpha2phi
6 min readFeb 9, 2023
A Walkthrough on Helix — A Post-Modern Modal Text Editor

This article is part of the Helix series.

Getting Started

The classical learning curve for Vim/Neovim is daunting for beginners. Besides that, to make Vim/Neovim usable for coding, a considerable amount of time is also required to configure the editor. Helix comes in as a good alternative for beginners.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/7Cu9Z.jpg

Helix is a Kakoune/Neovim-inspired editor, written in Rust. It comes pre-configured with sensible defaults that feature

  • Vim-like modal editing
  • Multiple selections
  • Built-in language server support
  • Smart, incremental syntax highlighting and code editing via tree-sitter

Installation

For installation, Helix provides pre-built binaries. Alternatively, we can build it from the source.

Configuration

Helix can be configured using the config.toml file in the following location.

  • Linux and Mac…

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alpha2phi
alpha2phi

Written by alpha2phi

Software engineer, Data Science and ML practitioner.

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