nixkell VS nix-direnv

A while ago I've put together a little skeleton that i use when creating new haskell projects: https://github.com/pwm/nixkell

Quite the opposite of caveman. You are used to 21st century tooling that not long ago Haskell simply did not have. I can relate. Luckily nowadays we have HLS thanks to all the amazing people involved. With HLS the IDE/editor matters less as long as they can use it. You probably would be most at home with VSCode. Re setup here’s a shameless nix-based plug: https://github.com/pwm/nixkell (Watch the gif in the readme)

Shameless plug for quickly setting up a project: https://github.com/pwm/nixkell

I've actually just started a small side-project trying to replicate the UX of stack with nix: https://github.com/pwm/nixkell

BTW: I personally use direnv with nix-direnv. This basically works by setting your shell with proper tooling when you enter the directory.

I'm not sure what you mean by nix env, maybe you are referring to nix-direnv?

Although currently I'm using direnv + nix-direnv. Keep in mind that direnv has builtin nix support which is very basic and doesn't do any caching. So you still needs this add-on to preserve roots.

I distinguish between system level things and user level things, even though I don't really have different users on my machine. I install the bare minimum number of packages + a lot of different drivers in the configuration.nix, and desktop and editor related things in HM. For development environment, I have environment per project using mkShell and https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv, which allows you to switch to the specific environment once you cd into the directory. (Although I do have python installed globally with some commonly used packages such as numpy, so I can just start python and write something when I need to, without creating an environment)

I further make my software projects so that when I click a link I go into an environment pre-loaded with their dependencies so dropping in/out of projects is always frictionless. I do this with the reproducibility guarantees of nix, along with glue like nix-direnv and envrc-mode to direnv.

(I also use nix-direnv)

direnv

Personally I use nix-direnv. No longer the need to run nix develop or nix-shell. By setting up a .envrc with either use nix or use flake it will automatically install all the packages from default/shell.nix or flake.nix

Direnv is installed using the nix-direnv installation instructions under "Via configuration.nix in NixOS". I read some recommendations that envrc.el is a better alternative then direnv.el, and after some testing I have to agree. (envrc-global-mode) is enabled in my config. This works perfectly with a normal emacs instance.