plugin-foreign-env VS nix-book

I am not using Guix's Fish because right I just installed it and was hoping to kinda get my packages up to snuff for what I keep on my desktop. Though I was about to install foreign-env via omf and that seems to work! I am super new to Guix so I still gotta read up on Guix Home. I literally have only installed like 6 packages right now haha.

The official installer leverages an initialization script, to be sourced at shell init time, which is written in POSIX shell. Fish can't just source it because it's not compatible with POSIX shell.

> I then searched the Internet and found a very "creative" workaround for Arch users that didn't work either.

Arch users shouldn't need anything special here.

You can use fenv¹ to source it, you can translate it to bash using babelfish, or you can exec into fish after running bash to log in (make sure to set $SHELL after if you choose that option). Just make sure you do it as early as possible if you want to use things installed by Nix in your other Fish config snippets.

I think Home Manager will also take care of this for you. (The other module systems, Nix-Darwin and NixOS, both do.)

If you wanna do it like NixOS does, you can install Fish via Nix and then create your own preinit environment script in /etc/fish. This has the advantage of setting up your Nix environment variables before any other config is sourced. You can take a look at it here, which also explains some of the Fish initialization process: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p...

and here's where the hooks go in the Fish package, where the comments describe the Fish initialization process in detail as well as why things are done this way on NixOS: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/p...

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1: https://github.com/oh-my-fish/plugin-foreign-env

2: https://github.com/bouk/babelfish

That's just not true, most stuff already has a fish equivalent, and for the minority which doesn't there are plugins like foreign-env

I'm also interested in the correct way of doing this. Right now, I cheat by using the fenv plugin to source a bash ~/.profile file:

This seems more approachable than NixOS/Guix, which I see as state or the art for declarative hosts.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-... aims to flatten the learning curve for NixOS.

We're onto the pedagogy thing. Check out the Nix book efforts: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-....

Regarding the language and "configurations" specifically, you might like what we do with Nickel: https://github.com/tweag/nickel. Research project showing a potential future for Nix.

Wouldn't say there's a steep learning curve for the language itself, it's pretty easy to get a grasp around it imo. Here's a helpful page I used to quickly get familiar with the language: https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p

What's rather messy about Nix is nixpkgs with its helper functions all over the place alongside pretty shallow / non-existent documentation (which is unrelated to the language). Thankfully they've started to work on that recently: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-...

yess https://github.com/NixOS/nix-book

there are efforts to better document the whole ecosystem (https://github.com/NixOS/nix-book)