nixos-configs VS readline

Recently switched to Hyprland (a Wayland tiling window manager) on NixOS. It's beautiful! As a former i3 user, I'm very happy with it. It looks really nice out of the box (especially compared to i3's default appearance) and has a lot of very interesting features.

I especially enjoy Hyprland's implementation of special workspaces, which allows me to hide specific application windows and summon them on-demand with a keybinding.

My Hyprland config is here for anyone interested: https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs/blob/master/roles...

This is what I use for my home lab running NixOS:

https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs/blob/d5b0ffbcc4cb...

This script is so nice because it's so simple: it follows the journalctl output of sshd.service and then sends a push notification to me through Gotify's CLI (I just need to remember to setup gotify when I setup my server). The best part is that it's so easy to modify this script for ANY systemd service that is using journalctl.

I alert on all successful and failed attempts, because in my home lab, I should be the only one logging in -- so I don't really get notifications unless I'm working on something. It's helped me a few times when I've accidentally left port 22 exposed to the world on some VPS' -- reminding me to add firewall rules to reduce access.

I use NixOS+GNOME+pop-shell for tiling windows on Linux, and I love it!

I am quite frequently on MacOS, and I use Yabai[0] and skhd[1], managed with Nix-Darwin for tiling windows and custom keyboard shortcuts. With how I make my Linux and MacOS builds look and feel identical it's pretty easy for me to forget when I'm on one vs the other.

For anyone curious, here's my repository for deploying my configs[3]. It's awesome to have one source of truth for managing NixOS servers and workstations, MacOS workstations, and other Linux workstations with Nix installed.

[0] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

[2] http://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/

[3] https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs

I really like NixOS (I just barely distro-hopped away from NixOS back to Arch). One reason I switched away is because similar to my i3 setup I would find myself tweaking my actual desktop/system more than getting work done. Mostly because I haven't sat down for a few hours to become more familiar with Nix's declarative language -- but I kind of don't Nix's language and think it is far from intuitive for me.

For reference, here's my nixpkgs repo (galaxy-chromebook is my most recent config): https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixpkgs

That's nice, were you aware of readline?

Do you want to build an interactive shell or a cli tool? For a custom shell I have used https://github.com/chzyer/readline before, but I did not work on it a lot.

I also wanted custom completions based on context and this readline implementation was decent for that.

On first glance, it seems like the Mac layout would be less convenient with Linux due to the alt/option key being further from the spacebar and more awkward to hit with your thumb. This makes a lot of commonly used keybindings (such as the standard readline keybindings, https://github.com/chzyer/readline/blob/master/doc/shortcut.md, commonly used in bash and other shells amongst other applications) harder to hit. Linux GUI applications use alt/option more frequently than super/command as well.

The authors keep a crib sheet here: https://github.com/chzyer/readline/blob/master/doc/shortcut.md

but that's the readline shortcuts which are the same no matter which Unix terminal you are using, on macOS, Linux, cygwin, git bash, WSL...

https://github.com/chzyer/readline/blob/master/doc/shortcut....