Motivation

For almost a year now, I am an avid user of the “post-modern text editor” Helix, which replaced NeoVim for me entirely. In Helix I write all kinds of configs, texts and code, primarily in R. Helix works flawlessly with it, especially with the built-in LSP. The only gripe I had with this was, that there was no easy way to write R-code in Helix and send it directly and interactively to R’s REPL, as you would in typical R IDEs like RStudio.

So earlier this year, I tried to workaround that issue by experimenting with TMUX and its send-keys feature. The results of this are available as installable script(s) in my git-repository.

Functionality

The idea behind it is quite simple: A TMUX session with a pre-defined name is spawned that runs the REPL we want to send our code to. This could be R, Python, Bash, … Next, Helix sends code in its selection to some process via its pipe-to command. This process’ job is to send the highlighted text to tmux line-by-line.

In its simplest form, the REPL in tmux could be started as:

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tmux new-session -s "my_repl" /usr/bin/R

The process that send text to this tmux session, let’s call it send-to-tmux.sh could be as easy as:

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#!/usr/bin/env bash

# read piped input
readarray -t lines

# send input to tmux line by line
for line in "${lines[@]}"; do
  tmux send-keys -t "my_repl" "$line" "Enter"
done

We could set up a keyboard shortcut for this in Helix in selection mode (hitting Ctrl-C twice):

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[keys.select]
C-c = { C-c = [":pipe-to send-to-tmux.sh"] }

Using helix-term

The final script(s) in my git-repository are slightly more complicated to allow a more streamlined workflow, such as sending the current code-paragraph in insert or normal mode from Helix and setting launching a separate tmux-session for each working-directory, so you can run multiple such processes at the same time.

In short, you can use my helix-term setup by running helix-term /usr/bin/R in the same working directory as the Helix process and hitting Ctrl-C twice for the code chunk you would like to send to the R-process.

Noteworthy alternatives

In a conversation with another Helix user, we found that we might have different use-cases. This user came up with another, yet similar approach that tries to turn Helix a little bit more into an IDE: hide. If helix-editor is too bare bones for your use-case, maybe hide is a better approach for you.