niv VS emacs-overlay

Compare niv vs emacs-overlay and see what are their differences.

niv

Easy dependency management for Nix projects (by nmattia)

emacs-overlay

Bleeding edge emacs overlay [maintainer=@adisbladis] (by nix-community)
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niv emacs-overlay
16 34
1,437 454
- 3.3%
6.3 10.0
20 days ago 4 days ago
Haskell Nix
MIT License -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

niv

Posts with mentions or reviews of niv. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-07.
  • NixOS + Haskell best practices circa March 2023
    6 projects | /r/haskell | 7 Mar 2023
    niv
  • What are the biggest Pain Points with NIX? And what makes it worth the pain?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 17 Aug 2022
    Essentially you can just think of it as a standardized default.nix/shell.nix with built-in Niv integration.
  • Our Roadmap for Nix
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Aug 2022
    I agree that the FP part is not the only issue. It's that the community feels a bit more academic/I'll fix this for myself in the way that works best for me.

    You can indeed achieve some reproducibility with Docker. It's tricky though, as you'd have to pin exact package versions of software. If you'd `FROM ubuntu:$VERION`, and would run an `apt-get update`, you're not guaranteed to get the same software.

    Nix is like ZFS, as that it breaks the wall between two previously distinct area's. Those being building software, and installing/configuration software on your OS. It's quite different from the snapshot-everything methodology that Docker uses. Yeah, one can split in multi-stage images etc, but than you'll be keeping track of which dependencies need to be moved between the stages yourself, in a manner that cannot be abstracted away, so you're doomed to repeat the same patterns over and over again.

    People also state that LVM + ext3 is more than sufficient compared to the complexity of ZFS. They miss out on the fact on how much more fine grained solutions are possible with ZFS.

    I've used niv [0] before flakes arrived, and am actually still using that instead of flakes. The experimental nature of them has scared me away from them, as I'm not daily involved in this ecosystem at the moment.

    [0] https://github.com/nmattia/niv#niv

  • Simplest way to set up neovim
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 26 Jun 2022
    You can use something like Niv to manage additional sources. I use it to fetch some Emacs packages, for example ligature.el. Then you update the package using $ niv update.
  • Unstable vs Stable channels
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 6 Jun 2022
    One thing that made this easier was switching from using Nix channels to explicitly pinning my dependencies with Niv. I honestly never fully understood how channels worked, and it's just much nicer to have everything specified in my Git repo. The exact commit of Nixpkgs that I'm using is in my sources.json file, so "reverting" just means checking out an older commit of my configs from Git then running nixos-rebuild switch. If I were redoing my dotfiles today I'd probably use Nix Flakes rather than Niv, but I suspect that Niv is still an easier option to get started with.
  • How to downgrade single package?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 31 Jan 2022
    Pin nixpkgs, and version control it. If you're using flakes, then just version control the flake.lock alongside your configuration. If you're not using flakes, you can use niv to easily pin nipxkgs, at the expense of some boiler plate.
  • Compiling emacs is killing me
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 22 Oct 2021
  • Ditch Your Version Manager
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Sep 2021
    This... This is laughable. How do I install ruby 2.6.8? Oh, there's no ruby_2_6_8, because of course there isn't. And this could be difference between a secure system and all your base are belong to us.

    And they call this reproducible builds?

    And that's before getting into the ridiculous

    --- start quote ---

    All the software that we installed depends on the specific version of the nixpkgs channel that we installed on our system [whose only version is a commit hash in a git repo]

    --- end quote ---

    So you need an extra tool [2] for, quote, "painless dependencies for Nix projects."

    Yes, sure. I'm definitely ditching my version managers in favor of this tool, that hasn't solved these issues in 18 years of its existence.

    [1] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=21.05&from=0&size=...

    [2] https://github.com/nmattia/niv

  • Fearless tinkering
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 21 May 2021
    Here is link number 1 - Previous text "b'niv'"
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 21 May 2021
    What is the upside of using Flakes instead of niv?

emacs-overlay

Posts with mentions or reviews of emacs-overlay. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-09.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing niv and emacs-overlay you can also consider the following projects:

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

flake-utils - Pure Nix flake utility functions [maintainer=@zimbatm]

use-package - A use-package declaration for simplifying your .emacs

lsp-mode - Emacs client/library for the Language Server Protocol

chemacs2 - Emacs version switcher, improved

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager

leksah - Haskell IDE

update-nix-fetchgit - A program to automatically update fetchgit values in Nix expressions

poetry2nix - Convert poetry projects to nix automagically [maintainer=@adisbladis]

NUR - Nix User Repository: User contributed nix packages [maintainer=@Mic92]

neovim - Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability

ghcid - Very low feature GHCi based IDE