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):

theme = "rose-pine-custom"

[editor]
rulers = [80, 120]

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

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:

• Use a custom theme that removes the background (based around rose_pine)
• 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.

Themes

As I want an aesthetically pleasing working environment. I wanted to make the background transparent, since I want to see a background that’s cool. And in order to do so, you have to do a bit of tinkering with the tools we have at our disposal.

There’s a convention for themes you might want to drop in or build yourself, and so you have to create a file at:

mkdir -p ~/.config/helix/themes

And then you can add a .toml file with a name (this name will be the one used to reference it in the config file later).

helix ~/.config/helix/themes/rose-pine-custom.toml

Inside this file I simply inserted two lines:

inherits="rose_pine"

"ui.background" = { }

I am using rose_pine, so I want to keep all of that look, yet I am overriding a specific property ui.background, if you set it to an empty object then it will make the background disappear (and since the terminal is transparent, as disussed in the alacritty section), with that, you can simply re-open a file and you will see how the background is now transparent

And so in the settings, I would simply reference this custom theme like so: rose-pine-custom.