emacs-overlay VS flake-utils

The project uses this overlay: https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay

What that means is if something is broken in Emacs, the community will fix it, and all I need to do is run `nix flake update` to grab the latest commit and then `nix run .#build-switch` to alter my system. Easy.

Thanks for the heads-up on the 404s! I've fixed those links.

In re: to org-agenda, I don't use that as much anymore. But I heavily, heavily using org-roam w/ org-roam-dailies everyday to build my own networked graph of notes. For tasks, nowadays I just use simple docs for projects and Asana to keep a catalog of everything.

Im a newish NixOS user, Ive used it like 20 times before but always quit because I couldnt debug errors, trying not to give up for the 20th time this time lmao; so Ive been trying to learn how to use overlays & flakes for a couple of days now. The ones I want to use/enable are: - Emacs-Overlay - Spicetify-Nix

Nix offers the same advantage through the use of emacs-overlay. Besides, Nixpkgs contains more Linux packages than any other distros. Depending on the user's needs, Nix is another option.

You can use this overlay to get the latest https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay

Depending on your goals, emacs-overlay is also worth a look.

{ pkgs ? import {} }: ((import (builtins.fetchTarball { url = "https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/archive/master.tar.gz"; })) pkgs pkgs).emacsGit

One option is to install Nix and use emacs-overlay.

You can install Nix on your mac and use https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/, which supports all the existing tree-sitter-based major modes OOB.

Its great to see both eglot and tree-sitter being merged. However, I am unhappy about the state of 'emacs configurations/distributions' right now. I have been using Doom Emacs, but the development is pretty much stalled there [0], and I don't think there is any distribution that is keeping up with these cutting-edge features (compared to the NeoVim ecosystem, let's say). Somehow it feels like I was seeing a lot more activity about Emacs configurations two-three years ago.

> Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of time

Ooh, this is interesting. Hoping to see a derivation in https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay soon.

[0] I am not complaining though as Doom was the main author's personal config from the get-go. I am just pointing out a void.

The ‘flake-utils’ readme is a pretty good jumping off point: https://github.com/numtide/flake-utils

I have this or that nitpick with FL and FLP but overall it’s very solid stuff. FLP is a little more “magical”, and that’s not always the best starting out, but you really can’t go wrong with either.

We added two inputs, the first is nixpkgs which lets us specify which version of nixpkgs we should use. There are many thousands of packages in the nixpkg repository, and they are updated often so here will use the unstable branch. We also added flake-utils which helps us generalize the flake to support multiple systems, not just Linux.

The inputs is how you can import external sources of other flakes into the flake project you have. In other words, any project you may need or tools required to get started, this is where you will define their source. Example below is using the standard nixpkgs and a tool called flake-utils, which provides a set of functions to make flake nix packages simpler to set up without external dependencies.

I'm not sure what nix-shell --pure does, but is it equivalent to using a flakes.nix in your projects? Ie i use https://github.com/numtide/flake-utils and direnv to replicate the old shell.nix with a Flakes setup. Per project i have a flakes.nix and a flakes.lock, so it feels just like my old shell.nix setup, but using flakes instead.

A Nix Flake is just an object - check out those surrounding curly braces. This object has two keys, inputs and outputs. The inputs are where we define the flake's dependencies and where to find all the tools we use. This one has two, nixpkgs and flake-utils. Each of these just points to a GitHub URL, and if you follow those links, you'll see each repo provides its own flake.nix. The outputs of each remote flake get piped into the inputs of my flake, so we can use what they provide.

You can easily transition your shell.nix (and default.nix) to a flake-based one by using flake-utils and flake-compat. The former is actually unnecessary, but I would recommend it for typical project environments. Unless you have an impure dependency, this transition would be easy.

Flakes can provide different types of things: - some flakes provide applications that you can nix run, - some flakes provide functions that you can import (e.g. https://github.com/numtide/flake-utils), - some flakes provide overlays to use with nixpkgs (e.g. that emacs-overlay you posted).