lorri VS direnv

lorri

And how does niv compare to https://github.com/target/lorri

Yes, you can "hold on", it's called gcroots. There's lorri which you can also use to defer the tediousness of managing the gcroots to a daemon.

Not that I know of but if you are having trouble with rebuilding and running out of memory, maybe the solution would be to cache the builds locally? You could use lorri to cache your development builds (https://github.com/target/lorri).

> Using a special command (nix-shell) whenever I needed to do development things (e.g. Rust builds) was not my idea of fun.

Funny you should mention that, because that's exactly what got me using Nix everywhere :). I've always hated installing tools and libraries globally—what if I need a different version for a future project?—so I like tools that sandbox as much as possible like virtualenv, cargo, cabal... etc. But these tools are all language-specific and have their own limitations (especially around native libraries and dependencies written in other languages).

nix-shell gives me the equivalent of virtualenv that works for everything. I can have a single sandboxed environment even if my project uses a bunch of different languages and I can manage everything in a reproducible, low-overhead fashion. No more worrying about making a mess by installing tools or packages globally.

Then, once I got really used to that, I spent some time setting up direnv[1] and lorri[2]—both of which are themselves managed with Nix, of course!—so that my environment gets automatically configured as soon as I enter a project directory without needing to call nix-shell explicitly. To be honest, the experience is still a bit rough, but it works well enough day-to-day that I have my reproducible sandbox cake and eat it in an mostly frictionless way too :).

[1]: https://direnv.net/

[2]: https://github.com/target/lorri

I also made the export diff configurable, motivated by this post: https://github.com/direnv/direnv/pull/1233

Nice.

For years I've been using [direnv](https://direnv.net/) for this, setting environment variables which git picks up. This looks like a more feature complete equivalent, although to be honest I only really need switching of committer email and the SSH key used.

Direnv, for the uninitiated, loads and unloads environment variables when directories are entered and exited. Under every project folder there is a `$PROJ_DIR/.envrc` which contains:

buffer-env: A pure-Elisp version of the direnv utility. Useful to make Emacs aware of Python virtualenvs (which, judging by the questions posted here, is unfortunately still a complication for a lot of people). Similar to (and inspired by) envrc, but doesn't require the direnv program.

You can look at direnv to see this in action as they wrote shell hooks that get loaded into the shell profile and are executed on every prompt. https://direnv.net/

Yes, most Nix users employ https://direnv.net or the equivalent for your IDE of choice. Emacs for instance has https://github.com/purcell/envrc which set per-buffer variables.

The more applications I write, the more I tend to avoid typical config files in favor of using direnv [0] to set environment variables.

[0] https://direnv.net/