Helix — Languages

Explore Helix's built-in programming language support and how to customize LSP and DAP.

Helix — Languages

By default, Helix comes with support for most programming languages. We will explore the built-in language support and learn to customize the configurations for several popular languages.

This article is part of the Helix series.

The Helix configuration files are available in this repository.

Getting Started

Helix comes with support for most programming languages, configured in the built-in languages.toml file. It provides the default configurations for languages and language servers. However, we can still customize the settings by

• using our languages.toml file in the configuration folder (Linux and Mac: ~/.config/helix/languages.toml, Windows: %AppData%\helix\languages.toml).
• using our languages.toml file in a .helix folder under our project. Its settings will be merged with the language configuration in the configuration directory and the built-in configuration.

To check the language support, we can use the following command.

hx --health languages

Language Support

In this article, we will go through the configurations for several popular programming languages.

Python

Let’s start with Python.

Language Server

By default, Helix uses pylsp as the language server.

We need to install the pylsp server.

pip install "python-lsp-server[all]"
pip install python-lsp-ruff

We install all the optional providers and python-lsp-ruff.

LSP completion should work out of the box, without any customization.

pylsp