devbox VS espanso

Before I went on my Christmas vacation last year I wrote an article on how I use Nix in my Elm projects. At the time, I was pleased with my set up. However, not even a month would go by before my satisfaction was questioned. In early January, Carlo Ascani asked a question, on the Elm Discourse, about his Umbra project. I decided to explore his project and I soon discovered two files, devbox.json and devbox.lock, I had never seen before. This piqued my curiosity and I had to learn more. I followed the link to the Devbox website and feverishly read the docs. I... was... hooked. I was pleasantly surprised by its simplicity and it seemed to fit my use cases really well.

How does Flox compare to Devbox? https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

I've spent the last year managing all my packages with Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox).

Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.

> Now to figure out what a "flake" is…

Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.

Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.

Also devbox ( https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox ) which is what this is for does not work on windows because of its Nix dependency.

For these reasons, I believe most developer environments should prioritize developer experience over fidelity. Tools like Containerized development environments and cloud emulators can strike the right balance and there’s no surprise that we see increased activity around devcontainers, and similar solutions.

Local first, cloud optional is the only way (IMHO) we're going to get people off their local laptop development setups.

We need to support local dev environments first, with the exact same config a developer can then move to the cloud.

See https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox for how this can be achieved and https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-clou... for my thoughts after 3 years of working in this space.

If you like the properties of Nix, but find it confusing, you should check out Devbox! It simplifies the process of creating Nix-powered dev environments:

https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

As part of the work we've been doing with [devbox](https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox), we needed a unit testing framework to test some of our nix code. Unfortunately we had some use cases where we did *not* want to introduce a dependency on `nixpkgs` (and therefore we couldn't use `runTests`).

If you want a standalone cross platform text expander I currently enjoy using Espanso[1]

[1]: https://espanso.org/

# espanso match file # For a complete introduction, visit the official docs at: https://espanso.org/docs/ # You can use this file to define the base matches (aka snippets) # that will be available in every application when using espanso. # Matches are substitution rules: when you type the "trigger" string # it gets replaced by the "replace" string. matches: # signatures - trigger: ";n" replace: "Nikola" - trigger: ";b" replace: "Brežnjak" - trigger: ";li" replace: "https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-bre%C5%BEnjak-892b9a24/" - trigger: ";sn" replace: "Kind regards,\nNikola Brežnjak\nhttp://www.nikola-breznjak.com/blog" - trigger: ";web" replace: "http://www.nikola-breznjak.com/" - trigger: ";em" replace: "[email protected]" ## git - trigger: ";ga" replace: "git add ." - trigger: ";gb" replace: "git branch" - trigger: ";gc" replace: "git commit -m " - trigger: ";gd" replace: "git diff --color " - trigger: ";gf" replace: "git fetch --all" - trigger: ";gi" replace: "find . -name '.DS_Store' -type f -delete" - trigger: ";gl" replace: "git log" - trigger: ";gp" replace: "git push origin main" - trigger: ";gs" replace: "git status" - trigger: ";gt" replace: "git remote -v" - trigger: ";gu" replace: "git pull origin main" ## blog - trigger: ";bimp" replace: "https://nikola-breznjak.com/blog/books/want-improve-read-books/" - trigger: ";brem" replace: "https://nikola-breznjak.com/blog/miscellaneou/make-remote-developer/" ## emojis - trigger: ";eew" replace: "⚠️" - trigger: ";eet" replace: "🤔" - trigger: ";eeb" replace: "💰" - trigger: ";eem" replace: "💪" - trigger: ";eetm" replace: "™" - trigger: ";eeh" replace: "❤️" - trigger: ";eeu" replace: "👍" - trigger: ";eep" replace: "🙏" - trigger: ";eef" replace: "🤦" - trigger: ";ees" replace: "🙂" - trigger: ";eeg" replace: "😎" - trigger: ";eev" replace: "👋" - trigger: ";eel" replace: "😂" - trigger: ";eec" replace: "👏" - trigger: ";eeo" replace: "✅" - trigger: ";eer" replace: "🚀" - trigger: ";eex" replace: "⏭️" ## replies - trigger: ";ryw" replace: "You’re welcome 👍" - trigger: ";rlmk" replace: "Please let me know 👍" - trigger: ";rbtw" replace: "Btw, how are things on your end?" - trigger: ";rt" replace: "Thank you! 👍" ## misc - trigger: ";fd" replace: "firebase deploy" - trigger: ";wed" replace: "Happy Wednesday (a dy on which, historically, most people wed on - thus: Wed nes day). Not really, but it would be a fun fact actually 🙂" - trigger: ";cl" replace: "console.log(" - trigger: ";se" replace: "select * from " - trigger: ";o" replace: "open ." - trigger: ";im" replace: "" vars: - name: "clipb" type: "clipboard" - trigger: ";ch" replace: "chrome://history" - trigger: ";;c" replace: "code ."

This should work for you. Free, cross-platform and works everywhere not just the browser. https://espanso.org/

Huh, didn't know abbrev had that limitation (wonder why?). Gave it a go in espanso (https://espanso.org/), and it does work there.

I use a tool called "Espanso" to accomplish something similar at work. It only runs locally, so no weird data scraping issues to worry about. And it's easy to update as things changes becauase everything lives in a simple yml file.

https://espanso.org/

It can do simple text replacement, so I have words, phrases, and sentences I use frequently compressed into a few keyboard clicks. It can also grab what is in your clipboard, so that can be incorporated into responses, which is simple but very handy.

A simple text replacement looks like this in the yaml file:

If you don't know what a text expander is, see: https://espanso.org