Release 25.01 Highlights

The new year brings in a new Helix release! Say hello to 25.01. This is an especially large release comprising changes from a whopping 171 contributors. Thank you to everyone who made this release possible!

New to Helix? Helix is a modal text editor with built-in support for multiple selections, Language Server Protocol (LSP), tree-sitter, and experimental support for Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP).

This large release has a bunch of big improvements so let's jump right in to the highlights.

Completions

Completions have seen two big updates in 25.01. First, completions now support paths:

Helix now detects a possible path when inserting text and suggests either absolute paths or relative paths based on the current working directory. This is especially useful for some languages like Nix where paths are commonplace.

Path completion is especially exciting because it's the first completion feature not driven by LSP. The change to add path completion refactored parts of the codebase that assumed that completions could only ever come from a language server and this should make it easier to add new completion sources in the future.

The other big change comes to the behavior of snippet completions - currently only sent by language servers - as 25.01 adds support for snippet tabstops.

In the recording above, rust-analyzer suggests a snippet completion for add that includes some placeholders for the function arguments. In the past Helix would clear these placeholders when accepting the completion with the Enter key. Now the Enter key jumps the cursor to the first tabstop. The Tab key can be used to switch to the next tabstop. Typing in any other character replaces the placeholder text.

Diagnostics

Historically, LSP diagnostics have appeared right-aligned in the top-right corner of the editor. While this display is straightforward, it can become hard to read on small terminal sizes or when a language server sends a long diagnostic message. 25.01 adds a new way to render diagnostics inline.

Inline diagnostics leverage the internal virtual text system to render diagnostics at the diagnostic's range in the document. Diagnostic messages appear after the end of the line or in between lines of the appropriate code.

Inline diagnostics are currently disabled by default as we tune the display and iron out bugs and can be enabled with a config like so:

# ~/.config/helix/config.toml
[editor]
# Minimum severity to show a diagnostic after the end of a line:
end-of-line-diagnostics = "hint"

[editor.inline-diagnostics]
# Minimum severity to show a diagnostic on the primary cursor's line.
# Note that `cursor-line` diagnostics are hidden in insert mode.
cursor-line = "error"
# Minimum severity to show a diagnostic on other lines:
# other-lines = "error"

Setting end-of-line-diagnostics, cursor-line or other-lines to anything other than "disable" enables inline diagnostics.

Tabular pickers

The picker UI component is central in Helix: it's an efficient and readable way to jump between files and locations of interest like LSP diagnostics and symbols. In 25.01 the picker component has been overhauled significantly so that items are laid out as a table.

Simple pickers such as the file picker (<space>f) which only need one column are unchanged. Pickers with multiple fields of information though now show column names at the top of the the results pane. Rows still correspond to individual items to pick but there are now columns that horizontally align the same kinds of content between items. The diagnostics picker for example now has three columns - "severity", "code" and "message" - while the LSP symbol picker has two - "kind" and "name".

Columns are individually filterable: one column is filtered by default and others can be filtered with a query syntax: %<column name> filter text. For example the diagnostics picker can now be filtered down to only errors by searching for %severity error. Filter text is fuzzy matched and column names may be specified by a prefix, so a search for %s e will behave the same in the diagnostics picker as a search for %severity error.

Alongside this change, the global_search command (<space>/) has been refactored to update with the picker's query dynamically. This allows searching a codebase for a regex interactively. Filenames can then be filtered separately with a query like %path filename.

Macro keybindings

Initial support for keybindings written as macros has landed in 25.01. Macro keybindings can be written by prefixing a string of inputs with @.

# Change the `<space>y` keybinding to yank to the `a` register instead of the
# system clipboard:
[keys.normal]
space.y = "@\"ay"

Macro keybindings use the same infrastructure as macros recorded with q and executed with Q, so the above behaves as if you typed

1. ": open the register select popup
2. a: select the 'a' register
3. y: copy the selection contents to the register

Macros cover a gap in keybindings: inputs into components like the register select popup are not exposed as commands, so operations like selecting a register would not otherwise be possible to bind.

The initial support for macro keybinding limits the bindings to be unusable in a command sequence: you can't yet combine macros with regular commands. For example you could swap out the y above for its command yank in a sequence like ["@\"a", "yank"], but this is not yet supported.

Commenting

25.01 includes improvements to commenting that make for a smoother experience when writing line comments like inline documentation.

Line comments are now continued by default: pressing the Enter key while in insert mode or o/O in normal mode while the cursor is on a line comment now extends that comment, inserting the current comment token prefix and a trailing space character. Trailing whitespace is now consistently stripped when pressing Enter, so <ret><ret> can be used to insert a break between two paragraphs in inline markdown documentation for example.

The join_selections and join_selections_space commands (J and A-J) have also been improved to now strip the comment token when combining line comments. This makes it easier to edit existing comments or fix spacing between paragraphs.

Wrapping up

As always, this is just the highlights from the 25.01 release. Check out the full changelog for the details.

Come chat about usage and development questions in the Matrix space and follow along with Helix's development in the GitHub repository.