Installation

We provide pre-built binaries on the GitHub Releases page.

OSX

A Homebrew tap is available:

brew tap helix-editor/helix
brew install helix

Linux

NixOS

A flake containing the package is available in the project root. The flake can also be used to spin up a reproducible development shell for working on Helix with nix develop.

Flake outputs are cached for each push to master using Cachix. With Cachix installed, cachix use helix will configure Nix to use cached outputs when possible.

Arch Linux

Releases are available in the community repository.

A helix-git package is also available on the AUR, which builds the master branch.

Fedora Linux

You can install the COPR package for Helix via

sudo dnf copr enable varlad/helix
sudo dnf install helix

Void Linux

sudo xbps-install helix

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/helix-editor/helix
cd helix
cargo install --path helix-term

This will install the hx binary to $HOME/.cargo/bin.

Helix also needs it's runtime files so make sure to copy/symlink the runtime/ directory into the config directory (for example ~/.config/helix/runtime on Linux/macOS). This location can be overridden via the HELIX_RUNTIME environment variable.

Finishing up the installation

To make sure everything is set up as expected you should finally run the helix healthcheck via

hx --health

For more information on the information displayed in the healthcheck results refer to Healthcheck.

Building tree-sitter grammars

Tree-sitter grammars must be fetched and compiled if not pre-packaged. Fetch grammars with hx --grammar fetch (requires git) and compile them with hx --grammar build (requires a C++ compiler).