Alabaster for Helix

Minimal Alabaster color themes for the Helix editor.

Philosophy

These themes follow the Alabaster philosophy by Nikita Prokopov: minimal syntax highlighting that emphasizes readability over decoration.

Only 4 semantic categories get color:

• Strings (green)
• Constants (magenta)
• Comments (red - they're important!)
• Definitions (blue - functions, types, classes)

Everything else (keywords, variables, operators) uses the default foreground color because the structure of code is already clear from its formatting.

Themes

This port includes the complete Alabaster family matching tonsky's original suite:

Standard Variants (Text Color Highlighting)

wolf-alabaster-light - Light background with colored text

wolf-alabaster-dark - Dark background with colored text

BG Variants (Background Color Highlighting)

wolf-alabaster-light-bg - Light background with colored backgrounds

wolf-alabaster-dark-bg - Dark background with colored backgrounds

Mono Variants (Minimal Color)

wolf-alabaster-light-mono - Light background, mostly grayscale

wolf-alabaster-dark-mono - Dark background, mostly grayscale

Installation

Using dotx (recommended)

If you use dotx to manage your dotfiles:

cd ~/<where-you-keep-your-dotfile-collections>/alabaster-for-helix
dotx install helix

This creates symlinks in ~/.config/helix/themes/ pointing to the theme files in this repo.

Manual installation

Copy the theme files to your Helix themes directory:

cp helix/dot-config/helix/themes/*.toml ~/.config/helix/themes/

Usage

Edit your ~/.config/helix/config.toml:

# Standard variants (text color)
theme = "wolf-alabaster-light"
theme = "wolf-alabaster-dark"

# BG variants (background color)
theme = "wolf-alabaster-light-bg"
theme = "wolf-alabaster-dark-bg"

# Mono variants (minimal color)
theme = "wolf-alabaster-light-mono"
theme = "wolf-alabaster-dark-mono"

Credits

• Based on Alabaster by Nikita Prokopov
• Adapted for Helix by Wolf

License

MIT