nix-gui VS nix-editor

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.

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.