nixos-generators VS emacs-overlay

Compare nixos-generators vs emacs-overlay and see what are their differences.

emacs-overlay

Bleeding edge emacs overlay [maintainer=@adisbladis] (by nix-community)
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nixos-generators emacs-overlay
20 34
1,508 459
14.1% 2.4%
8.3 10.0
4 days ago 5 days ago
Nix Nix
MIT License -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

nixos-generators

Posts with mentions or reviews of nixos-generators. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-26.
  • NixOS-generators – Collection of VM and Container disk image builders for NixOS
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2024
  • NixOS: Declarative Builds and Deployments
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jan 2024
    https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators
  • NixOS RFC 136 accepted: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Aug 2023
    Those Linode instructions are about installing an OS from an installation ISO from Linode's rescue mode. -- I'd consider that more a 'plus' to Linode that you get to be able to install whatever unsupported Linux on Linode's VMs. But, of course it's not as smooth as the officially supported images.

    Sibling comment mentions that NixOS provides ways to build VM images (e.g. https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators has a generator specifically for Linode).

    Another option is to use nixos-infect, which will replace a Linux distribution with a NixOS distribution. https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect

    > At that point, I feel like all of the repeatability gains are gone. If I want to spin up a fresh server, I have to read a guide and set stuff up by hand?

    Just as with ansible, "git pull to deploy". You'd keep a copy of your NixOS configuration.nix somewhere else, and would be able to apply it later.

    > it really does let me just get a new VPS and deploy to it very fast

    Using a tool you're familiar with to get the job done is going to be faster than learning to use a tool you're unfamiliar with.

    I believe much of the use of NixOS is for hobby stuff, and for personal machines. (c.f. "In what environments do you use Nix", Development (1242) vs Home Server (845) vs Production (386) https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983).

  • Questions about Nix
    1 project | /r/NixOS | 17 Jun 2023
  • Couple of noob questions
    6 projects | /r/Nix | 20 May 2023
    If you need to generate lxc container in NixOS then perhaps this repo might be useful: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators this article uses it https://www.thedroneely.com/posts/running-nixos-linux-containers/
  • disko-images - Create qcow2 images from NixOS + disko configuration
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 18 May 2023
    You might wanna check out nix-community/nixos-generators, it’s maintained by the same dude as Disko
  • How to do machine specific config on EC2 using an official nixos ami?
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 1 Apr 2023
    You can look at nixos-generators for support code that well let you take existing configs and build a variety of bootable images from them.
  • Flake to make NixOS iso
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 21 Mar 2023
    You should take a look at NixOS Generators, it's a flake with configs to build common formats like ISO, LXC, Docker, etc. I use that to generate an ISO with my config, specifically the packages.iso section.
  • Need help with NixOs VM Generation
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 25 Feb 2023
    I am trying to make use of https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators to generate qcow2 images from a NixOs configuration. Since it will be used with Scaleway, they require an efi bootable image.
  • [NixOS] How to Migrate From one Server to another? KVM to VMware
    1 project | /r/linuxquestions | 31 Jan 2023
    I haven't migrated machines from one vm provider to vmware, but I have provided a number of pregenerated nixos images (along the line of https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators) to clients to install onto vmware (and other - hyperv, xen, qemu, physical) hosts.

emacs-overlay

Posts with mentions or reviews of emacs-overlay. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-09.
  • Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: using Nix flakes the non-flake way
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
    The project uses this overlay: https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay

    What that means is if something is broken in Emacs, the community will fix it, and all I need to do is run `nix flake update` to grab the latest commit and then `nix run .#build-switch` to alter my system. Easy.

    Thanks for the heads-up on the 404s! I've fixed those links.

    In re: to org-agenda, I don't use that as much anymore. But I heavily, heavily using org-roam w/ org-roam-dailies everyday to build my own networked graph of notes. For tasks, nowadays I just use simple docs for projects and Asana to keep a catalog of everything.

  • NixOS&(Home-Manager) Flake/Overlays Help
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 31 Jul 2023
    Im a newish NixOS user, Ive used it like 20 times before but always quit because I couldnt debug errors, trying not to give up for the 20th time this time lmao; so Ive been trying to learn how to use overlays & flakes for a couple of days now. The ones I want to use/enable are: - Emacs-Overlay - Spicetify-Nix
  • My First Impressions of Nix
    33 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jun 2023
  • Which package manager should I use?
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 12 Apr 2023
    Nix offers the same advantage through the use of emacs-overlay. Besides, Nixpkgs contains more Linux packages than any other distros. Depending on the user's needs, Nix is another option.
  • It looks like the kellyk Emacs PPA is no longer maintained. Are there any alternatives?
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 26 Feb 2023
    You can use this overlay to get the latest https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay
  • Will any emacs package manager let me audit packages before installing them?
    4 projects | /r/emacs | 15 Feb 2023
    Depending on your goals, emacs-overlay is also worth a look.
  • dired navigation without infinite buffers
    5 projects | /r/emacs | 3 Feb 2023
    { pkgs ? import {} }: ((import (builtins.fetchTarball { url = "https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/archive/master.tar.gz"; })) pkgs pkgs).emacsGit
  • Installing Emacs 29 on Pop! OS
    2 projects | /r/emacs | 1 Jan 2023
    One option is to install Nix and use emacs-overlay.
  • How to use Emacs 29 Tree-sitter?
    12 projects | /r/emacs | 3 Dec 2022
    You can install Nix on your mac and use https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/, which supports all the existing tree-sitter-based major modes OOB.
  • Emacs 29 is nigh What can we expect?
    31 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2022
    Its great to see both eglot and tree-sitter being merged. However, I am unhappy about the state of 'emacs configurations/distributions' right now. I have been using Doom Emacs, but the development is pretty much stalled there [0], and I don't think there is any distribution that is keeping up with these cutting-edge features (compared to the NeoVim ecosystem, let's say). Somehow it feels like I was seeing a lot more activity about Emacs configurations two-three years ago.

    > Compile EmacsLisp files ahead of time

    Ooh, this is interesting. Hoping to see a derivation in https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay soon.

    [0] I am not complaining though as Doom was the main author's personal config from the get-go. I am just pointing out a void.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nixos-generators and emacs-overlay you can also consider the following projects:

poetry2nix - Convert poetry projects to nix automagically [maintainer=@adisbladis]

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

NixOS-docker - DEPRECATED! Dockerfiles to package Nix in a minimal docker container

flake-utils - Pure Nix flake utility functions [maintainer=@zimbatm]

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager

use-package - A use-package declaration for simplifying your .emacs

nix-gaming - Gaming on Nix

lsp-mode - Emacs client/library for the Language Server Protocol

nixops - NixOps is a tool for deploying to NixOS machines in a network or cloud.

chemacs2 - Emacs version switcher, improved

digga - A flake utility library to craft shell-, home-, and hosts- environments.