What is smith.hx?

smith.hx is a plugin manager for the Helix text editor. It works on top of a package installer called Forge, which is part of the Steel scripting engine that Helix can be built with. Instead of manually copying files or running an installer script, you list the plugins you want inside a configuration file called init.scm, and smith.hx installs them for you and loads them when Helix starts. If you remove a plugin from that list later, smith.hx will uninstall it automatically, as long as it was originally installed by smith.hx itself. To use it, Helix needs to be built with Steel support, and Steel's forge command needs to be available on your system. Once that is in place, you install smith.hx itself with a single Forge command pointing at its GitHub repository. From there, you write plugin declarations directly in init.scm, including settings and keybindings for each plugin, and smith.hx takes care of installing them through Forge and wiring them into your Helix setup. Plugins can come from GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, self hosted servers, or even local files. smith.hx figures out each plugin's name and its entry point automatically in most cases, though you can specify these by hand if a plugin does not follow the usual conventions. The tool also includes commands you can run inside Helix, such as smith-list to see what is installed, smith-update to refresh plugins, and smith-remove to take one out. You can create a lock file that records the exact installed version of every plugin, then use it later to restore those same exact versions elsewhere, which is useful if you want your Helix setup to look the same on a different machine. smith.hx keeps track of what it manages in its own registry file, so it never touches plugins that were installed outside of it.