Fixing Helix Colors on a Chromebook

Published: 2024-02-21 8:21 PM

Category: Technology | Tags: helix editor, helix, code, config, chromeos, crostini

Success! I've been using Helix on my Chromebook for almost a year and I was finally able to get editor themes working correctly. Helix has a great selection of themes but I was never able to get them working on this little machine. I had to install from source, which was a little dicey given how small the hard drive is and how low-power mid-range Chromebooks are in general. The development container works well but the terminal emulator on Chrome isn't well documented and I kept running into an error any time I tried to set the theme:

Unsupported theme: theme requires true color support.

Long story short, Helix does some kind of internal check for color support in the terminal and, for some reason, it would throw a false negative. I finally found a discussion thread in the repo from 2023 showing that you can set the editor section of the config file to override the auto check:

[editor]
true-color = true

Funnily enough, another ChromeOS user posted in the repo's discussions about ChromeOS specificallywith the same answer being given. I wish it hadn't taken me this long to figure out, but here we are.

It's still not my favorite for programming, but this little Chromebook can do a lot more than it seems on the surface. This is one more box checked off on my list and a mystery finally solved.