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 (dark themes: yellow; light themes: 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.

Design Decisions

Function calls vs definitions

Tonsky's original Alabaster highlights function definitions but not function calls. Helix's tree-sitter queries don't always distinguish these—some languages (Lua, Haskell) use function.call for calls, but most (Rust, Python, JavaScript) use bare function for both.

This theme sets function.call and function.method.call to the default foreground color, which helps in languages that distinguish them.

Builtin functions

Helix uses function.builtin exclusively at call sites (builtins like print() don't have user-visible definitions). Since these are calls, not definitions, we don't highlight them—consistent with tonsky's philosophy.

Bracket matching

Tonsky's Sublime theme highlights both brackets in a matching pair with blue foreground + underline. Helix's model is different: ui.match styles the other bracket (not under the cursor), while ui.cursor.match only affects the cursor's appearance, not the bracket character itself.

This theme uses blue + underline for ui.match, matching tonsky's style as closely as Helix allows. The bracket under the cursor remains styled as regular punctuation, but is visually distinct by virtue of being under the (blue) cursor.

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
• Feedback on missing scopes from @Rudxain (#15102)

License

MIT