This is for you if …

You have some spare time and want to dive into nix and or try another way to configure your machine environment.

And let me tell you, nix is a great way of remedying the problem of never having had all software admin problems at the same time!

Jokes aside, there actually is a decent way of managing your home setup, i.e. aliases and command line tools using home-manager.

Code

The results of me experimenting with nix and home-manager on an arch virtual machine can be found on github:

linux-nix-home-manager @ github

The arch virtual machine I’ve used I set up as described in the last two blog posts #1 and #2.

If you are contemplating modifying the flake.nix, home.nix or uv.nix files in the linked github repo, be aware that this may be quite a new type of dragon to ride, even if you have coding experience, and it may take some time to fend off all the errors. It took me some home-manager examples (why are so many of them so complicated?!), diving through forums, and reading up on the nix language to inch my config forward bit by bit. Maybe I’d been faster if I’d done these steps in a different order :P. But I’ve included helpful references in the github repo.

Why did I write this?

Having the config on my virtual machine was nice but then I wanted to use it on macOS and found that actually with some edits, which were only a minor pain compared to figuring out how to add uv :D, the setup worked es well! Also switching from bash on arch to zsh on macOS was super easy. Essentially I could reproduce my setup by 1) install nix, 2) clone repo, 3) minor edits in the nix files for OS specified entries and 4) build and done!

Also, if I want to get rid of a command line tool I just update my home-manager config and swoosh it’s gone, no need to worry which things may need removing anymore, similar for aliases and other command line tool configs.

So all problems solved?

Not quite.

If I want to add a new tool and it’s not one of the packages available out of the box with nix packages one needs to figure out how to install it.

A macOS specifically annoying part is that while GUI tools can be installed the same way as on arch, e.g. add them to home.packages in home.nix, they’ll not be found by Spotlight. But apparently no matter, nix-darwin may help with that. Something to try once the patience recharged. But you don’t need nix-darwin for user home specific setup and command line tools!