nix-gui VS nickel

This is pretty close https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui

Nix based aiming at beginners. If it combines/works with https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui, then an amazing distro may be created. It would be user friendly, but also extremely powerful, allowing basically everything to be configured via the gui. Both softwares are alpha state, but I am excited to see what they bring.

Maybe https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui? I dunno if it can do userspace config though.

Would it make sense to integrate something like nix gui into this?

I remember when I first started using NixOS, as a confused beginner I tried to find a graphical application to manage and edit my configuration. I stumbled upon Nix-Gui, however, I didn’t really like the look, it crashed a fair amount, and I never really figured out how to use it. That said, their idea and all of the hard work they put into their project inspired me to make a similar application that focuses more on simplicity and ease of use.

I was wondering if you are aware of https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui and how your tool compares to it

There is also a GUI in development, hopefully it will help casual users in the future.

There's https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui for a gui like experience.

Configuration language usage: Probably a major win for programmers, but a major negative for non-programmers. However, nix-gui has shown that there's potential for gui-based nixos configuration. And this might one day be extended to use as part of the graphical installer. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-is-there-no-installer-for-nixos/16644/21. Since nix can be serialized and deserialized to json, there's actually a fair amount of interoperability able to be done to manipulate nix configuration using existing libraries.

So, its key features are:

1. domain-specific: designed for conveniently creating and composing derivations. This reason alone already justifies a new language, or an embedded domain-specific language (such as the Guile/Scheme for guix), or a mix of both (Starlark, the build language of Bazel embedded in a restricted Python-variant).

2. purely functional: this ties well into the philosophical backing of Nix the package manager, which aims to be purely functional, also known as hermeticity in other build systems (Bazel).

3. lazily evaluated: similar to other build systems (including Bazel), so that you can build only what you need on demand.

4. dynamically typed: this one is controversial. Being dynamically typed—in other words, not developing a type system—gets Nix out of the door first. But users often complain about the lack of proper types and modularity. There are experiments to address this, such as Nickel (https://github.com/tweag/nickel).

It is understandable that a one-pager may not have space for the whys.

Nickel：Nickel is a straightforward configuration language aimed at automatically generating static configuration files. Essentially, it's akin to JSON with the addition of functions and types.

Also look at nickel which is an evolution of nix. It's my favorite in this space.

nickel-lang.org

https://github.com/tweag/nickel

Or this https://github.com/tweag/nickel

Nickel is a programming language. While HCL is just a configuration format, so not really comparable.

Here's a comparison with similar tools: https://github.com/tweag/nickel#comparison

As for 'providence', I suppose you meant provenance :) it's been delayed because this was less critical for 1.0 to decide on or to implement (as it: it doesn't break backward compatibility in any way to add this feature in the short term), but this is very much on the roadmap: Issue #235. That's a must-have in a language with merging like Nickel.

Have you considered using a different language for templating? this could be a BIG selling point. Some good ones are cue-lang (though I haven't seen support for rust), kcl or nickel-lang.