Dotfiles

My personal dotfiles repo managed using nix-darwin and home-manager.

Philosophy

The main philosophy is simplicity, in particular I've decided this means:

• A folder for each application
• Loose coupling between applications
• Be declarative
• Use the application's native config files
• Split config into multiple files where possible
• Comment liberally
• Use application defaults most of the time

Setup

1. Create all the MacOS account you intend to
   • Ensure each is signed into the Mac App Store (so that mas works)
2. Install nix using the Determinate Systems Installer
   • Make sure to install vanilla Nix
   • This only needs to happen on one of the accounts
3. Install homebrew on the user in homebrew.user
   • Currently personal
4. Run sudo nix run nix-darwin/master#darwin-rebuild -- switch --flake ~/dotfiles
   • This installs everything for both users

Updating after config change

sudo darwin-rebuild switch --flake ~/dotfiles

Trying out config changes

Home manager allows you to just run the build step:

sudo darwin-rebuild build --flake ~/dotfiles

This produces a ./result symlink you can inspect:

ls result/

I couldn't see an easy way to inspect the files generated by home-manager. One for future me :)

Common errors

`error: path '' does not exist

Nix flakes require files to be tracked by the git repo. Simply stage the file and the error should be fixed.

Running tests

nix flake check

Useful links

• nix-darwin config
• home-manager manual
• nix builtins + nixpkgs lib documentation viewer
• Useful nix hacks