Helix Settings

This lists out the different types of settings I have on helix when working with it on my personal machine.

Preamble

You can read about helix. For those who don’t know, Helix is made by a group of developers that separated from Vim and Neovim and wanted a better editor with all the lessons learned on those past projects. The reason I really like these types of editors is because of their minimalist nature, and due to the sea of shortcuts they provide for editing and visualizing text extremely fast (vim motions). Hence I tend to use them as much as I can. Configuring them can take hours, days, weeks, months, so I understand this is not for everyone, nor it is realistic to use them in some job settings. But for personal things, and in my day-to-day, I love tools such as these.

Anatomy of configuration

As any good Linux tool, it should adhere to predefined conventions, one of these conventions is that said tool should be highly configurable, and most of CLI tools you install will look at specific directories and files within them to pull configurations that override what they have by default.

Helix Configuration

When it comes to Helix, I chose to use the file at ~/.config/helix/config.toml. (If there’s no file there you can always create it yourself).

KISS: Keep it simple, stupid.

I am minimalistic in my configs as well, it’s by experience that I know that overly engineering anything is bad (even your own tool configuration):

# Remaps

[keys.insert]
"C-c" = "normal_mode"

# Visual

[editor]
rulers = [80, 144]

The idea is pretty simple, there are different settings that add behavior to Helix, I separate each subset of settings by a topic in the form of comments.

As of today, my settings are as follows:

• When in insert mode, by pressing Ctrl + C I can go back to normal mode.
• I set rulers so that I can see if my line is going for too long.