Nixos-Gui VS rnix-parser

https://github.com/Celestialme/Nixos-Gui try mine does not use flakes

If GUI program is what you are after there is few of them which are WIP. The only one that worked for me is Nixos-Gui, which also duplicates as sort of NixOS administration tool since it provides means to edit options, services etc. It's still rough around edges but it's getting there. For Flatpaks only you can use gnome software center, I believe

not perfect, i started working on it but then realized there is no good way to get appstream data for packages. especially i wanted icons. development stopped there. https://github.com/Celestialme/Nixos-Gui

So I am building this Nixos Gui application to install packages and edit configuration, So for the final touch I want to add icons to package listing, but I cant find source to get this icons from. Binary cache gives me full nar archives. Does anyone know way to get those icons from?

I definitely plan to support as much as I can, but there is definitely a level of complexity that can never be truly translated to a graphical tool. What I've found helpful during development for me is that I split the frontend GUI and the backed parser and editor into two projects (nixos-conf-editor and nix-editor), that way I could tackle a lot of the parsing and editing alone without worrying about specific GUI features needed (and use it for other projects). Later when I need some feature I add it to nix-editor. So far nix-editor supports simple attribute modification, array adding and popping, and recursive attribute definition and dereferencing. It's definitely not perfect by any means, but so far it's been enough for the projects I've been working on. I definitely need to credit any success I've had so far to the developers of rnix-parser which translates nix expression to easy to manage ASTs.

I'm hopeful that with https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-parser being a thing now, we can get some better Nix tooling, particularly for stuff like linting and doc extraction.

Okay, yes, I agree with all of that. Flakes are kind of a module system, but having clearer semantics around functions and classes would definitely help with both code readability and producing better stack traces.

And a proper type system would be awesome.

Regarding docs, it is interesting that portions of the nixpkgs source do seem to have docblock-like comments above the functions, but AFAICT there's no formalized process for extracting or rendering those. Given that https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-parser exists, I wonder how big of a leap it would be to actually extract those, render them into rST pages, and generate a searchable Sphinx manual.