Contributors are very welcome! No contribution is too small and all contributions are valued.
Some suggestions to get started:
- You can look at the good first issue label on the issue tracker.
- Help with packaging on various distributions needed!
- To use print debugging to the Helix log file, you must:
- Print using
log::info!, warn!, or error!. (log::info!("helix!"))
- Pass the appropriate verbosity level option for the desired log level. (
hx -v <file> for info, more vs for higher verbosity)
- Want to display the logs in a separate file instead of using the
:log-open command in your compiled Helix editor? Start your debug version with cargo run -- --log foo.log and in a new terminal use tail -f foo.log
- Instead of running a release version of Helix, while developing you may want to run in debug mode with
cargo run which is way faster to compile
- Looking for even faster compile times? Give a try to mold
- If your preferred language is missing, integrating a tree-sitter grammar for
it and defining syntax highlight queries for it is straight forward and
doesn't require much knowledge of the internals.
We provide an architecture.md that should give you
a good overview of the internals.
Some parts of the book are autogenerated from the code itself,
like the list of :commands and supported languages. To generate these
files, run
inside the project. We use xtask as an ad-hoc task runner.
To preview the book itself, install mdbook. Then, run
and visit http://localhost:3000.
Run cargo test --workspace to run unit tests and documentation tests in all packages.
Integration tests for helix-term can be run with cargo integration-test. Code
contributors are strongly encouraged to write integration tests for their code.
Existing tests can be used as examples. Helpers can be found in
helpers.rs. The log level can be set with the HELIX_LOG_LEVEL
environment variable, e.g. HELIX_LOG_LEVEL=debug cargo integration-test.
Contributors using MacOS might encounter Too many open files (os error 24)
failures while running integration tests. This can be resolved by increasing
the default value (e.g. to 10240 from 256) by running ulimit -n 10240.
Helix keeps an intentionally low MSRV for the sake of easy building and packaging
downstream. We follow Firefox's MSRV policy. Once Firefox's MSRV increases we
may bump ours as well, but be sure to check that popular distributions like Ubuntu
package the new MSRV version. When increasing the MSRV, update these three places:
- the
workspace.package.rust-version key in Cargo.toml in the repository root
- the
env.MSRV key at the top of .github/workflows/build.yml
- the
toolchain.channel key in rust-toolchain.toml