nix-gui VS nixos-conf-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.

Sounds a lot like nixos-conf-editor :) It allows for arbitrary nix code to be set for any option, and evaluates it to check for the correct type before setting it as the value in your configuration file

Actually already made a similar tool :) https://github.com/vlinkz/nixos-conf-editor

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.