nix-software-center VS nixos-conf-editor

That makes sense, too. You might also be interested in nix software center.

you can use nix-software-center by vlinkz

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.

building Nix... building the system configuration... copying path '/nix/store/n4ly8q7x7k4bf4hdgxjrrv955n1404a4-glibc-locales-2.35-163' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'... building '/nix/store/wby1m40a39dj4xwy16nvcspn76wng706-source.drv'... trying https://github.com/vlinkz/nix-software-center/archive/0.0.1.tar.gz % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0 100 1212k 0 1212k 0 0 1209k 0 --:--:-- 0:00:01 --:--:-- 1856k unpacking source archive /build/0.0.1.tar.gz error: hash mismatch in fixed-output derivation '/nix/store/wby1m40a39dj4xwy16nvcspn76wng706-source.drv': specified: sha256-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA= got: sha256-uolXh0z6gRBUZIXVSGyLn3swogz7VHvCwKCr02BejTQ= (use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)

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.