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

Install Rust stable and Zig 0.15.2 first. Zig is required to build the Ghostty-backed integrated terminal.

cargo build --release
./target/release/nucl

The repo-local Cargo config disables Helix's automatic grammar fetch during builds. Use nucl --grammar fetch / nucl --grammar build or the bundle script when you need to update packaged runtime grammars.

macOS Bundle

./scripts/bundle-mac.sh
open Nucleotide.app

Velopack Packages

Nucleotide publishes Velopack installers and update feeds for macOS. On Windows, the only install artifact is a portable *-Portable.zip bundle; extract the entire bundle to a writable directory and launch Nucleotide.exe. The release also includes the feed and packages used by the in-app updater.

Install Rust stable, Zig 0.15.2, the .NET 8 SDK, and the Velopack CLI before building a Windows portable package locally.

cargo build --release -p nucleotide --bins
git clone --depth 1 --branch 25.07.1 https://github.com/helix-editor/helix.git helix-temp
try {
  .\scripts\setup-windows-runtime.cmd -RuntimeSource helix-temp\runtime -NuclExe target\release\nucl-grammar.exe
} finally {
  Remove-Item -LiteralPath helix-temp -Recurse -Force
}
dotnet tool update -g vpk --version 1.2.0
.\scripts\package-velopack.ps1 -RequireRemoteHelpers

See docs/windows_install.md for local Windows Velopack build and install notes. See docs/application_updates.md for the in-app update flow and release pipeline.

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 uses Helix's platform config directory. It looks for nucleotide.toml there and falls back to Helix's config.toml for editor settings.

• Linux/macOS: commonly ~/.config/helix/nucleotide.toml
• Windows: %APPDATA%\helix\nucleotide.toml

See docs/examples/nucleotide.example.toml for a sample GUI configuration.

License

MPL-2.0 (same as Helix)