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edolstra / nix-ui.md
Last active August 16, 2025 00:03
Nix UI

General notes

  • nix-channel and ~/.nix-defexpr are gone. We'll use $NIX_PATH (or user environment specific overrides configured via nix set-path) to look up packages. Since $NIX_PATH supports URLs nowadays, this removes the need for channels: you can just set $NIX_PATH to e.g. https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-15.09/nixexprs.tar.xz and stay up to date automatically.

  • By default, packages are selected by attribute name, rather than the name attribute. Thus nix install hello is basically equivalent to nix-env -iA hello. The attribute name is recorded in the user environment manifest and used in upgrades. Thus (at least by default) hello won't be upgraded to helloVariant.

    @vcunat suggested making this an arbitrary Nix expression rather than an attrpath, e.g. firefox.override { enableFoo = true; }. However, such an expression would not have a key in the user environment, unlike an attrpath. Better to require an explicit flag for this.

TBD: How to deal with search path clashes.