nix-editor VS rnix-parser

I don't plan on it at this moment, however, if someone finishes the packagekit backend for Nix, the appstream data I'm working on collecting would work to display icons and screenshots. Also if someone who knew qt/kirigami development wanted to make something similar to nix-software-center, the backend tool that reads and modifies configuration values is a separate project: nix-editor, and I would be willing to help with any issues that arose from that.

You can mix and match as much as you want! Both tools use nix-editor to read and modify your configuration.nix file. So any changes made manually would be visible within the tools. Some more complex configuration structures might confuse the tools, but the goal is for it to just work

Tried it out, lots of cool features! The only nitpick I noticed was that it gets a bit confused with nested attributes, for example programs.gnupg.agent.enable = true; programs.gnupg.agent.enableSSHSupport = true; vs programs.gnupg.agent = { enable = true; enableSSHSupport = true; }; it doesn't seem able to handle the latter case yet. But if you ever wanted to, I made a crate that handles the backend of editing .nix file, nix-editor, crate here: https://crates.io/crates/nix-editor. It also uses rnix and handles all the attribute mess and editing files.

I definitely plan to support as much as I can, but there is definitely a level of complexity that can never be truly translated to a graphical tool. What I've found helpful during development for me is that I split the frontend GUI and the backed parser and editor into two projects (nixos-conf-editor and nix-editor), that way I could tackle a lot of the parsing and editing alone without worrying about specific GUI features needed (and use it for other projects). Later when I need some feature I add it to nix-editor. So far nix-editor supports simple attribute modification, array adding and popping, and recursive attribute definition and dereferencing. It's definitely not perfect by any means, but so far it's been enough for the projects I've been working on. I definitely need to credit any success I've had so far to the developers of rnix-parser which translates nix expression to easy to manage ASTs.

I definitely plan to support as much as I can, but there is definitely a level of complexity that can never be truly translated to a graphical tool. What I've found helpful during development for me is that I split the frontend GUI and the backed parser and editor into two projects (nixos-conf-editor and nix-editor), that way I could tackle a lot of the parsing and editing alone without worrying about specific GUI features needed (and use it for other projects). Later when I need some feature I add it to nix-editor. So far nix-editor supports simple attribute modification, array adding and popping, and recursive attribute definition and dereferencing. It's definitely not perfect by any means, but so far it's been enough for the projects I've been working on. I definitely need to credit any success I've had so far to the developers of rnix-parser which translates nix expression to easy to manage ASTs.

I'm hopeful that with https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-parser being a thing now, we can get some better Nix tooling, particularly for stuff like linting and doc extraction.

Okay, yes, I agree with all of that. Flakes are kind of a module system, but having clearer semantics around functions and classes would definitely help with both code readability and producing better stack traces.

And a proper type system would be awesome.

Regarding docs, it is interesting that portions of the nixpkgs source do seem to have docblock-like comments above the functions, but AFAICT there's no formalized process for extracting or rendering those. Given that https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-parser exists, I wonder how big of a leap it would be to actually extract those, render them into rST pages, and generate a searchable Sphinx manual.