Helix Editor Release 25.07 Highlights

Summary

Release 25.07 Highlights 15 July 2025 A long-awaited 25.07 release is finally here. This release saw the replacement of a major, core component of Helix and the addition of plenty of flashy features besides. This release saw changes from 195 contributors. A hearty 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). Buckle up; these release notes will get a bit technical as we talk about our new bindings to Tree-sitter, tree-house. Before we get into the weeds, let's see check out flashier features. File explorer 25.07 adds a file explorer under <space>e. The file explorer is a picker, a telescope-like UI component central to Helix. Like most other pickers you can fuzzy search within the options. Selecting a directory with Enter opens a new file explorer under that directory and selecting a file opens that file. This is useful for examining a directory as a hierarchy. In contrast the usual file explorer (<space>f) opens a picker with the contents of a directory recursively. For sprawling projects, the file explorer can be a more precise tool. LSP documentColors One of the flashier features of the Language Server Protocol (LSP) spec is the Document Color Request. This request allows the client (Helix) to ask a language server like tailwindcss-language-server or vscode-css-language-server what ranges of the document correspond to RGB colors. In 25.07 Helix now requests document colors from language servers and displays the swatch (a small box) with the color, inline. This is exactly like the LSP inlay hints feature - which shows types - but for colors. New command mode features Command mode (:) is used to execute typable commands. :write is a typable command, for example, that takes an optional argument. So is :quit - which takes no arguments. The syntax for command mode is nu...