I Use Nix on macOS

I’ve beeen using Nix on macOS for years now, and I don’t imagine ever going back. Declarative software management is the future. So easy to keep my dev environment up-to-date and quickly try out new packages. Never breaks.<p>Also, no more docker! docker on macOS was always a pain.<p>I made it easy for others to try if you’re interested, almost 800 stars now:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dustinlyons&#x2F;nixos-config">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dustinlyons&#x2F;nixos-config</a>

There exists nix-darwin, which allows for installing and configuring graphical apps on macOS. However, in my experience the OS starts freaking out about permissions every time you build --switch. Something about changing around the symlinks to .app files confuses it and resets permissions and duplicates autostart entries and such, which unfortunately got me to give up on it.

it&#x27;s interesting to me that the author didn&#x27;t spend much time on home-manager or flakes. home-manager is apparently too complicated for OPs workflow which I could kinda see for simple things. But reproducibility is one of the strongest selling points of nix.<p>So.. that being said, you can setup home-manager to install and configure things from git. Using flakes makes it more reproducible.<p>These means that you can just git clone and &#x27;home-manager switch&#x27; and setup everything from scratch.<p>I do this on both mac and linux machines (ubuntu 20) and quite often use the same nix expressions.<p>I&#x27;d highly recommend that workflow, since it&#x27;s git, you can do anything you want. Go back a month via git on a branch and make that machine exist again.<p>It really makes managing software fearless

&gt; nix run nixpkgs#cowsay<p>&gt; This is a game-changer, you don’t have to pollute your system to run a one-off command, or you can try a package out before committing to installing it.<p>Is there a way to run the command isolated from the rest of the system? Because while this is nice it will still leave behind whatever configuration files &#x2F; caches the program created on start up.

&gt; What you may miss from Homebrew &gt; &gt; The only thing that comes to mind is Homebrew Cask<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daiderd.com&#x2F;nix-darwin&#x2F;manual&#x2F;index.html#opt-homebrew.caskArgs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daiderd.com&#x2F;nix-darwin&#x2F;manual&#x2F;index.html#opt-homebre...</a>

I&#x27;ve been using Nix through Jetpack&#x27;s Devbox and I&#x27;m kinda happy, btw.

Not a fan of nix as it literally deleted itself from my machine after running some command or other lmao