Enabling Omarchy theme colors for Helix editor

[dwaynebradley]

This follows along with the suggestion of how to enable Omarchy theme colorized output when using bat: #4906

If you happen to be using the Helix editor, you can easily enable it to follow along with the Omarchy theme colors very similar to how bat can do the same thing.

• If it doesn't already exist, create a new config file for Helix: $HOME/.config/helix/config.toml
• In this file, add the following line at the top of the file: theme = "base16_terminal"

Now, when you use Helix, the color settings from the selected Omarchy theme's colors.toml file will follow along into Helix as well.

Here are some side-by-side comparisons of Helix and Neovim after making this change:

Hackerman:

Matte Black:

As you can see, the difference between Helix and Neovim are definitely different but at least this allows Helix to somewhat following along with Omarchy theming and not have to deal with the (in my opinion awful) default theme from Helix! 🤮 😂

[dwaynebradley]

Digging a little more though the themes that Helix provides, theme = "term16_dark" does a little better job highlighting keywords from at least the Go language...

Hackerman:

Matte Black:

[lukehsiao]

With https://docs.helix-editor.com/themes.html?highlight=inheri#inheritance, it should be possible to implement this with proper themes.

Specifically, something like

1. In each Omarchy theme directory (~/.config/omarchy/themes//), add a helix.toml containing either a full Helix theme or just inherits = "<some_base>" plus palette overrides derived from the Omarchy palette.
2. Symlink ~/.config/helix/themes/omarchy.toml → the currently active theme's helix.toml (Omarchy already uses this symlink-swap pattern for its other apps — the "current" theme is a symlink at ~/.config/omarchy/current/theme).
3. Set theme = "omarchy" in ~/.config/helix/config.toml.
4. After a theme switch, send SIGUSR1 to running Helix instances: pkill -USR1 hx. Helix reloads config (and the theme) on that signal — equivalent to running :config-reload inside the editor.

You'd hook step 4 into Omarchy's theme-switch script.

I can likely verify this work myself.

However, I'm not sure omarchy itself would be open to this PR, since helix is not a default editor. @dhh do you have an opinion here? Should I make a PR, or just post some notes?

[dhh]

You can add a helix template that's generated from the same as the other themed configs by putting it in ~/.config/omarchy/themed/helix.conf.tpl. See the existing .tpl files inside of Omarchy.

[lukehsiao]

Here's an example approach with dotfiles: lukehsiao/dotfiles@7f44edd

[dhh]

Actually, I wouldn't mind taking that helix.conf.tpl. And then have a omarchy-install-helix that sets up the conf to use it.

[lukehsiao]

Awesome! I will submit a PR shortly.

update: #5530