building on ubuntu 22.04.3 doesnt have syntax highlighting for Rust

[Corallus-Caninus]

Summary

I followed the instructions exactly including setting up runtime files and fetching and building grammars but hx --health shows that there isnt any syntax highlighting. the only difference is I dont have lldb-vscode. I tried installing llvm as per some forum suggestions and linking the bin directory but it doesnt install lldb-vscode by default.

Reproduction Steps

follow the build instructions exactly on ubuntu.

Helix log

its empty.

Platform

Ubuntu

Terminal Emulator

GNOME

Installation Method

cargo build

Helix Version

latest (master)

[the-mikedavis]

lldb-vscode isn't necessary for syntax highlighting, just the runtime files. If you see all "X"s in hx --health then you haven't installed the runtime files properly.

[Corallus-Caninus]

i dont have all xs just lldb, highlighting etc. can anyone verify this or does ubuntu normally build highlighting correctly with fetch and build grammars?

[Corallus-Caninus]

I solved this by setting the runtime env to the snap binary after installing helix with apt:

bada@bada-System-Product-Name:~/Code/helix$ export HELIX_RUNTIME=/snap/helix/21/bin/runtime

it seems the instructions in the installation documentation https://docs.helix-editor.com/install.html#building-from-source for fetch and build don't setup highlighting on my system.

I'll leave it up to the repo owners to close this since this doesnt seem like a proper solution

lldb-vscode is still not installed via "apt install llvm"

[jerabaul29]

I was bumping my head on the same issue (also on Ubuntu 22.04). The problem is how I was exporting the runtime location from my bashrc; I had added the line suggested in the documentation from https://docs.helix-editor.com/install.html#building-from-source :

HELIX_RUNTIME=~/src/helix/runtime

However, this was not working for me, I needed to add the following line instead:

export HELIX_RUNTIME="/home/kzm/src/helix/runtime"

I.e. I needed i) to make sure to export to pass it to child processes, and ii) to use the full name, i.e. /home/kzm instead of ~, using ~ was (weirdly?) resulting in a folder not found error. With this I get:

kzm@kzm-bpq:~/src/helix$ hx --health
Config file: /home/kzm/.config/helix/config.toml
Language file: default
Log file: /home/kzm/.cache/helix/helix.log
Runtime directories: /home/kzm/.config/helix/runtime;/home/kzm/src/helix/runtime;/home/kzm/.cargo/bin/runtime
Runtime directory is empty: /home/kzm/.cargo/bin/runtime
Clipboard provider: wl-paste+wl-copy
System clipboard provider: wl-paste+wl-copy

Language                LSP                     DAP                     Highlight               Textobject              Indent                  
agda                    None                    None                    ✓                       ✘                       ✘                       
bash                    ✘ bash-language-serv…   None                    ✓                       ✓                       ✓                       
[etc..., but looks as expected]

@Corallus-Caninus would be curious to hear if this fixes things for you too :) .

@the-mikedavis do you think it would make sense to update the documentation at https://docs.helix-editor.com/install.html#building-from-source from:

HELIX_RUNTIME=~/src/helix/runtime

to:

export HELIX_RUNTIME="/home/${USERNAME}/src/helix/runtime"

or something like this? :) (not sure why the ~ is not recognized, but adding the export does make sense for sure :) )

[jerabaul29]

(another thing I got when trying to build was the same issue as rust-lang/cc-rs#909 , i.e. lots of issues along the line of:

cargo-warning:Compiler version doesn't include clang or GCC: "cc" "--version"

but somehow this is gone now, and it seems that these builds are cached somewhere, as if I try to re-run them, I just get

kzm@kzm-bpq:~$ hx --grammar fetch
Fetching 171 grammars
171 up to date git grammars
kzm@kzm-bpq:~$ hx --grammar build
Building 171 grammars
171 grammars already built

even trying to build from a new folder. So this seems not to have been the root cause of the issue (and the fix above does work for me).