Helix and Typst are a match made in heaven

I love Markdown with all my heart. It’s a markup language so simple to understand that even people who are not software engineers can use it in a few minutes.

The flip side of that coin if that Markdown is limited. It can let you create various title levels, bold, italics, strikethrough, tables, links, and a bit more, but not so much.

When it comes to more complex documents, most people resort to full fledged office suite like Microsoft Office or LibreOffice. Both have their merits, but office file formats are brittle and heavy.

The alternative is to use another more complex markup language. Academics used to be into LaTeX but it’s often tedious to use. Typst emerged more recently as a simpler yet useful markup language to create well formatted documents.

Tinymist is a language server for Typst. It provides the usual services a Language server provides, like semantic highlighting, code actions, formatting, etc.

But it really stands out by providing a live preview feature that keeps your cursor in sync in Helix when you are clicking around in the live preview!

I only had to install it with

$ brew install tinymist

I then configured Helix to use tinymist for Typst documents, enabling live preview along the way. This happens of course in ~/.config/helix/languages.toml

[language-server.tinymist]
command = "tinymist"
config = { preview.background.enabled = true, preview.background.args = ["--data-plane-host=127.0.0.1:23635", "--invert-colors=never", "--open"] }

[[language]]
name = "typst"
language-servers = ["tinymist"]

A warm thank you to my lovely friend Felix for showing me the live preview mode of tinymist!