Nix Chad

---

An opinionated macOS setup focused on software development.

Features

Firefox

discoverable key mappings

After pressing ? key a window enumerating all contextual key mappings appears.

Neovim

programming/configuration languages support

language	actions	completion	diagnostics	formatting	highlighting
bash	☒	☑	☑	☑	☑
dhall	☒	☑	☑	☑	☑
docker	☒	☒	☑	☒	☑
GitHub Actions workflow	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
html	☒	☑	☑	☑	☑
java	☒	☑	☑	☑	☑
json	☒	☑	☑	☑	☑
javascript	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
lua	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
markdown	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
nix	☒	☑	☑	☑	☑
purescript	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
python	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
typescript	☑	☑	☑	☑	☑
yaml	☑	☒	☑	☑	☑

discoverable key mappings

After pressing \ key a window enumerating all key mappings appears. The same window shows when user starts but does not finish a key sequence which has some action assigned to it.

Prerequisites

• Nix 2.4+

Configuration

Initializing from a template

Run from a directory of your choice:

nix flake init --template github:mstream/nix-chad/main#default

Tweaking

Update any config entries to your liking, like in this example.

Applying

After any change to configuration, run from the directory where flake.nix file resides:

nix run .#switch

Warning

While it is easy to roll back unwanted/broken configuration by either reverting your configuration changes or using a different nix-chad flake revision, there are some classes of misconfigurations that are more difficult to undo.

One of them is one that results in an error during ZSH shell initialization. If that results in, e.g. PATH environmental variable not being properly set, you may lose easy access to your binaries.

In this situation, to recover back to working state, you may need to:

• switch to Bash using an absolute binary path
• use GUI tools (maybe enough to edit but not enough to rebuild Nix configuration)
• set PATH environmental variable manually (requires knowledge about Nix)
• install needed binaries without nix (an overkill just for recovery)
• using absolute nix store paths (very fiddly)

None of these options are convenient and most of them require relatively broad administrative knowledge. Thus, after every switch, it is highly recommended to:

• leave current shell session open
• create a new one,
• observe if initialization scripts do not produce any errors,
• and if so, use the previous session to fix the issues

Updating

To stay up-to-date witch changes to Nix Chad, run periodically:

nix flake update