Nix

What started as a staunch effort to not implement nix in my day to day technology has turned into a full on embracing of it. I don’t think I would have stuck with it had it not been for my LLM of choice: Gemini. With basic effort I was able to move from “I just want to manage my dotfiles and config in a better way” to “hmm, I could standardize my entire system”. I was using chezmoi, and it was fine. Great for managing dotfiles, but I like to tinker.

I’m not a fan of homebrew for various reasons, and one of the difficulties I was having was getting notmuch to compile and run. I tried macports. Loads of trouble for this particular package. Great for other things, but not this particular package. I tried mise, which in theory solved some of the other package manager sorts of issues I was trying to solve, but then nixos kept popping up. “Why the heck not?”. I gave it a try, and while I’m not an evangelist (yet), I’m liking it to solve the things I’m wanting to solve: package management, dotfiles, project specific development environments with different tools.