calamares-nixos-extensions VS nixos-conf-editor

In my opinion, NixOS is a great operating system and is very straightforward and stable once you learn how to use it, however for someone without knowledge about Nix or who has never heard of NixOS, it can be very confusing. I stumbled upon Nix and NixOS a bit less than a year ago, and since then have worked to try to create tools that make using NixOS more user/noob friendly, namely: adding the calamares installer to NixOS, creating a graphical configuration editor: nixos-conf-editor, and creating a GNOME software-like software center: nix-software-center.

Sounds a lot like nixos-conf-editor :) It allows for arbitrary nix code to be set for any option, and evaluates it to check for the correct type before setting it as the value in your configuration file

Actually already made a similar tool :) https://github.com/vlinkz/nixos-conf-editor

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.