Helix 25.07: What's New?

Hi, I'm David, your developer on duty. And in this video, we're going to have a look at the new highlights of the 257 release of the Helix text editor. So, let's start Helix and have a look at the first feature, which is the file explorer. So, you probably already know the file picker. It works like that. You can grab uh for some files and see um the file content. But now we also have the file explorer which you open by pressing E to open it in the workspace root. You can also work open it in the current buffers directory. So let's press E. And now you can see the structure of your file system. You can uh go to your index.js some directory. When you press enter, it goes into this directory. then you can explore the file system and eventually also open files. The next feature is related to document colors. Some language servers allow clients to request information of a document with respect to colors. So let's see how that works. I open some CSS file and you can see the respective colors are shown with these little swatches. These are those squares showing the color. So in Helix there's the command mode that's when you press colon you already know that where you can for example say write and the code to parse and represent the arguments of such commands was completely rewritten and also now supports better features. For example, if I want to take these strings here and I select them all using S to select and I can say select everything, then my cursor is split. And now I can run sort and provide flags and you can see them here in this code completion and I can for example say reverse sort. So formally you would have written r sort. Now you can provide flags for sort which does what you expect. You can also now use expansions in a very nice way. So for example you can write echo and then whenever you have a percentage and those curly braces you have the possibility to use a few of those uh variables. For example the buffer name the language the cursor line and so on. And it's quite useful. So if I run echo percentage curly brace buffer name then to sort is printed because that's how my buffer is called. And you can also have more sophisticated commands. For example, if you want to have the get blame of the current line, you can do echo percentage shell to provide a way to execute a shell command. You can run get blame minus l. And then you need the cursor line which you get with cursor line plus one. And also you need the buffer name. And once you do that you can see the get blame result. And of course you would store this in a key binding. In this Helix release the team replaced the old tree sitter bindings and custom highlighter with a new purpose-built crate called treehouse. And this improves maintainability and performance and also enables a more efficient incremental parsing and is able to handle complex features like syntax injections and locals tracking for which some long-standing bugs appeared which are now fixed. It also is the foundation for future improvements um by organizing the syntax as a tree of trees which allows then faster queries and also a consistent behavior across all tree sitter based features. And as always this feature list was not complete. So please have a look at the official change log release entry. You can find all the changes here. And please post in the comments which feature you like best and what you are looking forward in the next release. Thanks for watching and stay tuned.

Let's look at the new features of the Helix text editor 25.07. https://helix-editor.com/ Contact: david.devonduty@gmail.com #helix