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)