Severity: wishlist

Hi,

I would like to discuss whether it would be useful to ship an example
configuration file for helix.

I am currently facing some configuration issues while recommending this
to others. I think providing a default config file called example would
help resolve these problems.

First, the theme doesn’t appear after default installation. In many
terminals, the `COLORTERM=truecolor` variable has no default setting, so
the theme always appears gray.

Second, the default purple theme is difficult to read for me (and the
posts I see on Reddit). I prefer the catppuccin-macchiato theme.

There are also some other personal settings that I won’t go into detail
about here.

So I propose creating a default configuration—it could be simple, or it
could list all available options (which seems to increase my maintenance
workload 😆).

Here’s the config I’m using right now:
```toml
[editor]
theme = "catppuccin_macchiato"

[editor]
line-number = "relative"
true-color = true
default-yank-register = "+"

[editor.cursor-shape]
normal = "block"
insert = "bar"
select = "bar"

[editor.lsp]
display-inlay-hints = true
```

Quoting Junyong Liang (2026-08-06 19:26:57)

An example config is a low-hanging fruit: That is just a file that we
ship below /usr/share/doc/hx/examples/ that we imagine has some general
use - can be inspirational use, so perfectly fine to share strongly
biased or weird configuration examples there.

A default config is something else - that should be generally useful
not only inspirationally but functionally - so things like "let's
hardcode use of 24-bit color disregarding what the terminal says" are
unacceptable there, and even "let's use theme foo" is questionable.

What would be the proper, elegant approach would be to use debconf:
https://wiki.debian.org/debconf

This also ties into an old idea of mine to introduce a generic package
in Debian for user-facing cross-package choices like "should dark or
light be preferred?" and "base tinting color" and "console font?" and
"console color depth (and should it be forced)?". Because such debconf
questions are relevant not only for helix but for a large range of
packages, potentially, if the maintainers ever engage in setting up the
needed packaging infrastructure to handle debconf for their default
config setup.

Helix could be a frontier here: We could do the hard work of setting up
proper separation of general questions and application-specific
translation of those answered questions into auto-generation at
package install time of maintainable default settings.

What do you think?

The easy part is to compose 1 or 19 example configs and ship those with
the hx package...

 - Jonas