Contributing

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 severity inclusive)
• 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.

Auto generated documentation

Some parts of the book are autogenerated from the code itself, like the list of :commands and supported languages. To generate these files, run

cargo xtask docgen

inside the project. We use xtask as an ad-hoc task runner and thus do not require any dependencies other than cargo (You don't have to cargo install anything either).