nix-index VS nix-doc

nix-index can be used to provide this functionality, and to automate this process you can use nix-index-database (setup instructions are in the README).

Are you using flakes? AFAIK `command-not-found` does not work with them. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/171054 and https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-isnt-there-an-official-bui...

I think `nix-index` works as a replacement: https://github.com/bennofs/nix-index

If you are on another distro or mac os there is also nix-index

nix-index is another option for searching for pkgs. You can search by name, or by specific files within a pkg.

You can use nix-locate from https://github.com/bennofs/nix-index to find files on NixOS:

nix-index makes it trivial to find which package contains a given file.

There are two ways I know of: - If you use old-school channels, there's an index in the channel. In particular, the command-not-found hook is able to use that. In this particular case, you would have to guess that git will look for the git-clang-tools, and command-not-found that. This looks like it only works for programs, not arbitrary files. - In any case, you can use the more general nix-index. That's what I did because I use flakes.

I use nix-index a lot to find which derivation a file belongs to, but building the index takes a while and so I end up not updating it very frequently.

Look at the library missing say X Use nix-locate to find the derivation that includes libX.dylib file (if it can’t find the macOS dylib version of the file try using the same name for linux by changing dylib for so) Add the derivation to you environmental and try again It will find the next missing library on the next compile.

I love nix, I've been using it for the last 2 years, I have a very stable setup from these 2 years of effort [0], and I just can't recommend Nix for Linux beginners, why?

It's not because of the nix language, It's not because of the CLI, it's because everything is scattered, you have to consult many places to find out how to do things with Nix, here is an example:

Usually, when I need a new complex program, like Steam, I first check the system-wide configuration [1], the wiki [2] and the package list [3], if I just want it on my user, I need to check if Home Manager has an option [4], if it doesn't, I can try using the "home.packages" option. Now, if I need to override something on the package, I need to remember how to do it with [5] [6] (while checking the source code for the package in parallel to find the options).

And then sometimes, on very rare occasions, I need to fine tune something with the nix language, so I need to check the builtins/lib docs [7], but some builtins are not there, so I need to either use nix-doc [8] or find the docs inside the code-bases [9] [10] (they are split between both repos)

For me, this is one of the main pain points of using Nix / NixOS that needs to be solved.

[0] - https://github.com/shiryel/nixos-dotfiles

[1] - https://search.nixos.org/options

[2] - https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Steam

[3] - https://search.nixos.org/packages

[4] - https://mipmip.github.io/home-manager-option-search/

[5] - https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-customising-packa...

[6] - https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/nixpkgs-overriding-packag...

[7] - https://teu5us.github.io/nix-lib.html

[8] - https://github.com/lf-/nix-doc

[9] - https://github.com/NixOS/nix

[10] - https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs