Home Manager using Nix VS nixpkgs-config

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.

You can also take a look at my server configuration which uses flakes. And my separately-managed home-manager configuration which also uses flakes

My "rice": https://github.com/jonringer/nixpkgs-config

I configure my neovim through home-manager. My configuration. Pulling vimPlugins from nixpkgs should give you something which works with NixOS (or anywhere for that matter, NixOS is essentially a clean room).

My dot file repo.

Home-manager link My example setup

Reference: - home.nix entry - Which refers to it's own dedicated file

If you want to take nix for a spin, i would recommend trying home-manager. It's essentially NixOS, but for dot files. It can install packages and services in addition to manage configuration. Also, I've been able to get it work on NixOS, WSL2, ubuntu, and macOS. Personal configuration if you're curious how it would look.

> And about Home Manager, the reason why I think it's over-hyped is because it provides a declarative approach to something that was... already declarative. Your $XDG_CONFIG directory does not need a leaky Nix abstraction on top of it

I don't really agree, I spent about 30mins to get my home-manager config to support an m1 mac [0]. I don't really want to think how long it would take me to look up all of the homebrew package names, and learn a new package manager. Instead, I just pushed all of the linux-specific items into their own bin, a little more logic, and I was able to get back to a comfortable terminal + git + vim settings.

Also, nix exposes congruent configuration management[1]. The state of my system is an exact reflection of the configuration. With other tools like ansible, vagrant, etc, I would get reconciliation configuration which is close on initial install but configuration drift is an ever-present concern; not to mention that large recipes and playbooks can take a very long time to run. Going the homebrew route would be divergent configuration, it would be very hard for me to get back to a certain configuration. With nix (and by extension home-manager), I can version control the configuration, improve it, roll it back, w/e I want.

> Why would I write my i3 config in Nix??

You do get some type checking, although the iteration time would probably be similar. You could also just do `xsession.windowManager.i3.extraConfig = builtins.readFile ./i3.config;` if you really just wanted to wholesale read in your existing profile.

> I'd rather just use `nix-env` personally.

nix-env is a double edge sword. You can rollback (somewhat, I believe it's just a stack of all changes), which is an improvement. However, nix only retains the "derivation name" to try and management. But for packages like python38, if you try to upgrade it, it will determine that `python-3.11-a3` is the package which is the most up-to-date. I try to discourage using nix-env.

[0]: https://github.com/jonringer/nixpkgs-config/commit/37ddfefa1...

Here and full config here