dotfiles VS direnv

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.

I think direnv already does a good job in this space, and it's already available in your package manager.

https://direnv.net/

I switched from asdf to mise after a comment on lobste.rs[1] suggested I do so a few months ago, and I have been very happy with it.

It sands off some of asdf's sharp UI edges and provides a somewhat larger but still reasonable feature set; I've also replaced most of my direnv[2] usage with it.

The mise -> asdf comparison page is useful[3]

1: https://lobste.rs/s/66uxbj/how_love_homebrew#c_mvmsjp

2: https://direnv.net/

3: https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/comparison-to-asdf.html

I also made the export diff configurable, motivated by this post: https://github.com/direnv/direnv/pull/1233

Nice.

For years I've been using [direnv](https://direnv.net/) for this, setting environment variables which git picks up. This looks like a more feature complete equivalent, although to be honest I only really need switching of committer email and the SSH key used.

Direnv, for the uninitiated, loads and unloads environment variables when directories are entered and exited. Under every project folder there is a `$PROJ_DIR/.envrc` which contains:

buffer-env: A pure-Elisp version of the direnv utility. Useful to make Emacs aware of Python virtualenvs (which, judging by the questions posted here, is unfortunately still a complication for a lot of people). Similar to (and inspired by) envrc, but doesn't require the direnv program.

You can look at direnv to see this in action as they wrote shell hooks that get loaded into the shell profile and are executed on every prompt. https://direnv.net/

Yes, most Nix users employ https://direnv.net or the equivalent for your IDE of choice. Emacs for instance has https://github.com/purcell/envrc which set per-buffer variables.