has anyone gotten helix to play nicely with supercollider REPL-style or otherwise?

[0x736562]

i use supercollider and unfortunately the IDE doesn't have any sort of modal editing setting, let alone a "helix mode". i see that there's plugins/modes for vim and emacs, plus a plugin for vscode that seems to use an LSP. however i can't really make sense on how to start using helix for supercollider, specially since code execution happens on a bit more of a REPL style, where you usually run specific lines of code or statements/selections instead of an entire file in a procedural manner

before i start messing around, has anyone gotten supercollider to play well with helix in any way? this is the one type of use case where i wonder if just using emacs with a helix mode is better

[Charlie284]

You can get a useful Helix + persistent sclang workflow, but the linked language server is not a drop-in Helix LSP at the moment.

Helix already recognizes .sc, .scd, and .quark files and includes the SuperCollider tree-sitter grammar (current language entry). It does not configure a SuperCollider language server. LanguageServer.quark communicates over two UDP ports selected through SCLANG_LSP_CLIENTPORT and SCLANG_LSP_SERVERPORT (source); the VS Code extension supplies the UDP reader/writer bridge and registers the nonstandard textDocument/evaluateSelection feature (source, feature registration). A normal Helix language-server.command = "sclang" therefore won't reproduce that integration; it would need a UDP-to-stdio adapter, and evaluation would still need separate editor support.

For REPL-style evaluation, the practical route is to reuse scvim's transport independently of Vim. Its start_pipe keeps one sclang process alive behind a FIFO, while sc_dispatcher -i CODE writes the code plus the form-feed that asks sclang to interpret it (dispatcher, persistent process).

Run scvim/bin/start_pipe in another terminal, then put a small stdin adapter somewhere on your PATH, for example sc-send:

#!/bin/sh
code=$(cat)
exec /absolute/path/to/scvim/bin/sc_dispatcher -i "$code"

Make it executable, then add a Helix binding:

[keys.normal.space]
e = ":pipe-to sc-send"

[keys.select.space]
e = ":pipe-to sc-send"

Helix's :pipe-to sends each selection to a command and ignores its output, which is exactly what the dispatcher needs (keymap). Use x then Space e for a line, make an arbitrary selection for a statement, or use Alt-o to expand to the surrounding syntax node before sending a parenthesized block. Because all sends go to the same sclang process, definitions and server state persist like a REPL.

This gives Helix-style editing and live evaluation, but not the VS Code/scvim/scel post window, help browser, completion, and server controls. If those are essential, one of those integrations is still the lower-friction choice; for editing plus evaluate-selection, the pipe setup is workable.