Note: I wrote the vast majority of this post on August 24, 2022, but I decided that it was a whiny rant that I didn’t want to publish. I came across the draft in January 2024, remembered that this entire series is a whiny rant, and decided to publish it anyway. I’ve been a happy Nix user for about 18 months now, and– well, not happy happy, but satisfied… no… not really satisfied either; perhaps it’s more of a resigned disgruntlement; a feeling that despite its many flaws, it’s s...| ianthehenry.com
I’ve been using Nix for a few months now, and one of my largest outstanding pain points is that any time I’m in a nix-shell, none of my stuff works the way I want it to. On a scale from “uses the stock PS1” to “wrote their own shell,” I’m prettttty far to the right. I haven’t actually written my own shell, but, you know, I’ve started writing my own shell, and I have lots of aliases and a fancy custom fzf-based autocomplete thing and weird tmux integrations and strong feeling...| ianthehenry.com
So a sort of crazy thing happened to the Nix UI between Nix 2.3 and 2.4. nix shell, the command that opens a shell, was renamed to nix develop. nix develop is not only more to type (no, nix dev does not work), but it’s also a… misleading name for this command. I publish and preview my blog from a Nix shell, which has dependencies like my static site generator and CSS prefixer and such. I do not think of this as “developing” my blog. I think of it as writing my blog within a Nix shell....| ianthehenry.com