Nucleotide
A Native GUI for Helix
Nucleotide is a high-performance graphical interface for the Helix modal editor, bringing the power of terminal-based modal editing to a modern native GUI.
Built on Giants
Nucleotide wouldn't exist without these incredible projects:
- Helix - The powerful modal editor that powers our editing engine
- GPUI - Zed's blazing-fast GPU-accelerated UI framework
- helix-gpui - The original project we forked from, created by @polachok
We are deeply grateful to these projects and their maintainers for making Nucleotide possible.
Features
Currently, Nucleotide provides a native GUI wrapper around Helix with:
- Native macOS/Linux/Windows support
- GPU-accelerated rendering via GPUI
- File tree sidebar
- Integrated terminal (planned)
- Full Helix keybinding support
Installation
From Source
cargo build --release ./target/release/nucl
macOS Bundle
./bundle-mac.sh open Nucleotide.app
Development Setup
Install Git Hooks
To ensure consistent code formatting, install the pre-commit hooks:
./scripts/install-hooks.sh
This will set up automatic cargo fmt checks before each commit.
Configuration
Nucleotide looks for configuration in ~/.config/helix/nucleotide.toml and falls back to Helix configuration at ~/.config/helix/config.toml.
License
MPL-2.0 (same as Helix)