A Basic Helix Setup for JavaScript

Lately I’ve been a bit bored with my tried and true development tools and I’ve been playing with some alternatives. One of the most interesting tools I came across is the Helix editor. It’s inspired by vim and you can think of it a simpler (and less configurable) vim relative. I’ll probably write more about Helix in the future, but today I simply want to share how easy it is to set up Helix for JavaScript programming.

Helix has built-in support for all the modern goodies like LSP and TreeSitter, so all you need to do is install the right tools and you’re ready for action. I’d suggest starting with checking the output of the hx --health command:

$ hx --health javascript
Configured language servers:
  ✘ typescript-language-server: 'typescript-language-server' not found in $PATH
Configured debug adapter:
Binary for debug adapter: '' not found in $PATH
Configured formatter: None
Tree-sitter parser: ✓
Highlight queries: ✓
Textobject queries: ✓
Indent queries: ✓

Okay, it seems I need to install typescript-language-server. That as easy as running the following command:

npm install typescript-language-server -g

Let’s check hx --health again to see if that got the job done:

$ hx --health javascript
Configured language servers:
  ✓ typescript-language-server: /Users/bbatsov/.nvm/versions/node/v22.13.0/bin/typescript-language-server
Configured debug adapter:
Binary for debug adapter: '' not found in $PATH
Configured formatter: None
Tree-sitter parser: ✓
Highlight queries: ✓
Textobject queries: ✓
Indent queries: ✓``` 

Seems we’re in business! But when I tried editing JavaScript code in Helix for some reason the LSP integration was not working. Fortunately for us, Helix has a great debugging falicity in the form of helix -v which writes a log file to ~/.cache/helix/helix.log. All the communication with the LSP servers gets logged there. You can quickly access it from Helix with the :log-open command. There I quickly discovered the problem:

2025-02-21T10:18:32.462 helix_lsp::transport [ERROR] typescript-language-server <- InternalError: Request initialize failed with message: Could not find a valid TypeScript installation. Please ensure that the “typescript” dependency is installed in the workspace or that a valid tsserver.path is specified. Exiting.

So, it seems typescript-language-server doesn’t depend on typescript. Oh, well… let’s install it as well:

npm install typescript -g

At this point things should start working properly for you and you’d getting the full power of typescript-language-lsp in Helix.

I don’t know about you, but for me it’s really impressive you can setup an editor so quickly, without touching the configuration at all. Perhaps most modern editors work this way, but this has definitely not been my experience with my beloved Emacs or its arch nemesic (Neo)vim.

That’s all I have for you today! I can heartily recommend playing a bit with Helix if you’re looking for a modern, fast and simple text editor that gets stuff done. Keep hacking!