Quoting Junyong Liang (2026-08-06 19:26:57) > 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 😆).
You talk about multiple related things here, it seems. Great things! 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 -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ * Sponsorship: https://ko-fi.com/drjones [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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