yadm VS Home Manager using Nix

Everyone hand-rolls their own dotfile management system, but YADM already does everything you need:

https://yadm.io/

I've been working around this using tools built on top of git like [yadm](https://github.com/TheLocehiliosan/yadm) and relying on `ls-files` to list all my tracked dotfiles and their paths.

Still having everything in one place would make things much simpler. Great idea!

I wonder if the program i use to manage my dotfiles could help manage your scripts and extend your setup to all your desktops? Its called yadm (https://yadm.io/) it makes it so easy to have a laptop and a desktop or two.

I really like that one but still prefer yadm because you can just edit your files as usual and then yadm add them wherever you are.

If you haven’t already, this is the time to install a tool like yadm and get your computer configuration into version control. Your command-line tools can be managed by yadm directly, your system settings can mostly be managed with a yadm bootstrap script that runs things like defaults write, and the software you install can be managed with a Brewfile that the yadm bootstrap script uses to install software with Homebrew. Don’t manually download Xcode, use xcodes to do it.

I personally use YADM. It's basically a git repo on my home folder, that only tracks what I explicitly set. And you can setup bootstraps to do what you said, install a bunch of stuff or make custom changes. In it's essence, it's a set of bash/sh files that are executed sequentially when you launch the yadm bootstrap command.

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.