dotfiles VS snowflake

NixOS. If you still need Docker you can define and manage that via Nix too. I love it, both for this and managing development environments. Happy to answer any questions.

With Nix we have a shell.nix in the root of our repo describing all of the project's system dependencies. It looks something like this. You can pin nixpkgs with Flakes (think lockfiles) or by hardcoding a specific revision. We do the latter because I didn't want to complicate the Nix install for everyone by requiring they enable experimetnal features.

Nix, for example updating from rls to rust-analyzer.

I agree that the documentation story could be better. I also think it's a great shame that the language isn't statically-typed, so to understand how to use something I have to inspect its source code.

I've found it to be quite flexible though. For example, here's a commit in which I apply a patch to a tool to solve a problem that the derivation hadn't taken into account (and absent a home-manager solution): https://github.com/samhh/dotfiles/commit/867dd3b4d4b3942a0aa...

You may like to look at my newsboat config. It's biased towards FP and Linux.

Sure thing, I manage it in my dotfiles repo here.

I wonder if you'd have better luck if you built your xmonad as a proper Haskell app and didn't use the built-in --recompile stuff. It's not Nix, but see here an example of how I'm doing that.

Here's my config: https://github.com/samhh/dotfiles/blob/master/home/.config/git/config

This is possible for quickfix, see my dotfiles commit here.

Managed to stitch a lua script together that does exactly this + promote a couple of language selections. (Will add other option tomorrow)

It seems that I have found some solutions here and there but I was unable to mimic them even though I tried really hard. I am afraid Nix is not my friend, yet.