Helix — config.toml

Let’s start our journey to explore Helix, a post-modern text editor.

alpha2phi
7 min readJul 29

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Helix — config.toml

We will go through configuration options to get us started using Helix.

This article is part of the Helix series.

The Helix configuration files are available in this repository.

Getting Started

In the Helix walkthrough article, we covered the essential features of Helix. In this article, we will go through the basics and cover more advanced configurations in future articles.

Check out this article for a quick introduction to Helix!

Helix comes with sensible defaults. Unlike other editors like Vim or Emacs, only minimal configuration changes are needed for developers to be productive using it.

We will go through configuration options that developers may want to customize in this article.

Configuration File

To override the global configuration parameters, create a config.toml file located in the config directory:

  • Linux and Mac: ~/.config/helix/config.toml
  • Windows: %AppData%\helix\config.toml

Helix also supports configuration at the workspace or project level, by using the .helix/config.toml file.

The following commands are related to the config file.

  • :config-open to open the user config.toml file.
  • :config-reload to refresh the user config.
  • :config-open-workspace to open the workspace config.toml file.

We can use the following commands to get, set, or toggle the configuration options.

  • :get-option to get the current value of a config option.
  • :set-option to set a config option at run-time.
  • :toggle-option to toggle a boolean config option at run-time.

Mapping ESC Key

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alpha2phi

Software engineer, Data Science and ML practitioner.