You can filter Helix pickers

Last modified April 7, 2026

Helix has a system of pickers. It’s a pop up window to open files, or open diagnostics coming from a Language Server.

A screenshot of Helix with a picker open in a terminal. It displays several lines of error. Each line is split into 4 columns: severity, source, code and message.

The diagnostics picker displays data in columns:

severity
source
code
message

Sometimes it can get very crowded, especially when you have plenty of hints but few actual errors. I didn’t know it, but Helix supports filtering in pickers!

The same picture as above, except the user has typed in "%se WA" and it now only shows the lines that have a severity to "WARN"

By typing %severity WARN I only get warnings. I can even shorten it to %se (and not %s, since source also starts with an s). The full syntax is well documented in the pickers documentation.