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 0.17.0 first. Zig is required to build the Ghostty-backed integrated terminal.

The Rust bindings are pinned to an upstream Git revision with Zig 0.17 support until that update is released on crates.io. The Nix Ghostty source pin matches the bindings' native library revision; update them together.

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 0.17.0, the .NET 8 SDK, and the Velopack CLI before building a Windows portable package locally.

cargo build --release -p nucleotide --bins
.\scripts\clone-helix-runtime.ps1 -Destination 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 1.2.161
.\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 for GUI settings and loads Helix's config.toml separately for editor settings and keybindings.

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

Copy the complete annotated example to that location for all supported GUI parameters, descriptions, accepted values and defaults. Optional overrides remain commented out to preserve platform defaults. Settings that are parsed but not yet wired to runtime behaviour are labelled in the example. Save the file, then choose Settings > Reload Configuration (under Nucleotide on macOS/Linux or File on Windows), or restart Nucleotide.

License

MPL-2.0 (same as Helix)