Containerized helix development environments with readily installed LSPs built in

[jerabaul29]

I love helix but I have found it a bit tiredsome to use it on a variety of machines, some of which I am not admin on, and to administrate all the LSPs and language support I need to be fully productive. In particular installing many LSPs, that rely on a variety of build systems / installation methods, has been a bit painful to me. Also if I want to get someone I know to give a serious try at helix, and they are used to VSC where they can just click-install language support through extensions, it is much easier if I can just show them a simple way to use helix.

To solve all of this, I have set up a Containerfile in order to put together a container that has inside it helix, and all the LSPs I need (I use python, cpp, and rust, so these are the ones installed so far). See if there is interest: https://github.com/jerabaul29/containerized_development_environment/tree/main/development_with_helix .

Disclaimer: this is for sure an ugly "Frankenstein" horror of a Containerfile for a purist. This may be a "misuse" of containers in a sense. There is a huge amount of stuff in the image, it is sloooowww to build (but hey, CPU time is cheap), heavy on disk (but hey, disk is cheap), and probably it is quite badly written and architectured from a Containerfile point of view (WIP). But if fits my needs and I can use it on machines where I am not admin, and I am happy with it :) . I can do stuff like (and this is sub-1s to do on my machine, so more than fast enough to me):

$ podman run -ti --rm --volume ~/Desktop/Current/test_container/:/home/helix_ubuntu/host_mountpoint_project:Z,U --hostname contdev localhost/helix:latest
(base) ✔ contdev:~/host_mountpoint_project> hlx --health rust
Configured language servers:
  ✓ cspell-lsp: /home/helix_ubuntu/bin/cspell-lsp
  ✓ harper-ls: /home/helix_ubuntu/.cargo/bin/harper-ls
  ✓ simple-completion-language-server: /home/helix_ubuntu/.cargo/bin/simple-completion-language-server
  ✓ rust-analyzer: /usr/bin/rust-analyzer
Configured debug adapter: lldb-dap
Binary for debug adapter: 'lldb-dap' not found in $PATH
Configured formatter: None
Tree-sitter parser: ✓
Highlight queries: ✓
Textobject queries: ✓
Indent queries: ✓

Another example: I love to use the solution from @sourproton for REPL in python which I use a lot when working with data and for scientific work ( #2806 (comment) ), and I have scripted it so I can just:

(base) ✔ contdev:~/host_mountpoint_project> hj hello.py

and get to something like this out of the box (fast too, all of the tmux content spins in sub-1s on my machine):

No guarantee of support nor if / how much I will polish it, but if it can be useful, feel free :) .