Nix is my favorite package manager to use on macOS

What terminal /config is that?

Is emacs your favourite editor?

This is a fantastic guide for Nix. Thank you so much!

I wonder if I can use Nix? On my MacBook Air 2013 I can’t use home brew for some packages because it’s locked to Big Sur, so I have to run CMake and build binaries manually (for example ImageMagick). I haven’t been keeping track of the configs but maybe Nix-Darwin will help manage all that.

This is a game changer for how I use macOS. The video is remarkably well done. Looking forward to the next one.

In my opinion, it has a lot configuration steps 😂

Every morning I start with configuration of my fresh macos install. But for me having Brewfile and df repo is enough

really enjoyed and im rolling it out for my stuff, look forward to the follow on video!

I have trubble with installing mas
the prompt and the shell don't reconize the command mas but the mas is installed in the system

Is it safe to run flake on the current system. I don't want to loose system binaries let's say vim itself?

awesome video! thanks for this. The video really help me getting started with nix after looking at it for a while from the sidelines and just using ansible and brew. Nearly done with migration to nix.

I loved using nix to sync development environments. But trying to use it behind a draconian corporate firewall was not fun

This is mostly great, but on a fresh install of Sequoia, I'm having a couple issues with this. "brews" get installed, but are not in my path so my terminal can't find them. And also, even though mkalias is creating aliases in Applications/Nix Apps, they are still not showing in Spotlight.

Hi! Really enjoyed the video although I don't have a Mac :( Could you consider doing a somewhat similar video for us the Arch folk which want to use this instead of the AUR?

I use a lot of applications from Setapp subscription, I guess it cannot be handled by nix to install Setapp and all those apps

A word of warning when using Apple Silicon. DO NOT FORGET TO CHANGE THE HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE before running any command. I failed to change that before running the `nix run .... nix-darwin ...` command. Changing the architecture after the fact, I was already in a bad state. When I later changed the architecture, nothing worked, everything failed with a bad architecture error message.

I ended up completely removing nix, and reinstalling. This again didn't work because I should apparently have uninstalled nix-darwin first. So there were some SSL certificate lookup issues, which took some time figuring out.

This was a big hassle that would have been avoided if I had properly followed your steps, and change the hardware architecture immediately. (Problem of first watching the video to the end, and then decide to try it myself after that, just fast-forwarding to the important bits).

OMG!! This is so awesome

Home manager video when?

I am lost for words, truly amazing piece of content. Can't wait for the next video!

Thanks!

I am myself evaluating NixOS but in WSL since I am on Windows. The learning curve is quite steep but I found it very impressive to be able to fully declare the expected state of your system. Not something that you could not do without the help of shell scripts but the Nix way can be very concise and portable. I also build some custom cli tools when "building" the OS. It is very easy to integrate them.
Also the nixPkgs repository is huge, it is hard to not find what you like. And I have noticed that more and more projects on github have nix flake or nix shell to build them.
Sadly with WSL there are some quirks like the user's systemd not working currently (without workarounds) and the boot is really slow. So I am not sure if I'll keep it. I don't want to go back to VMs on Hyper-V (even if it can be really fast). I'd rather switch to Mac OS ;-)

nice! waiting for more ;)

I really enjoyed this video, wasn't too technical but also didn't lack detail so I could understand what I was doing as I followed along, I feel like I can finally start learning nix

Please do a video about home-manager and nix! I've been tryint to make that work but I'm not sure if I'm doing things right

I noticed that you installed Firefox via Homebrew, but it's also available on Linux. I'm curious if there's a particular reason for doing it that way. Amazing video by the way. Hyped for your next one.

Homebrew has always been garbage, the average Linux package manager is miles ahead.

How does this sync between linux and mac? How does it deal with app store apps that aren't on linux?

Lost you at "my favorite cli application Neovim". I'm gonna stick with homebrew thanks

Hi thank you for video!
One thing remains unclear to me - how do you pin to dock application installed from appstore?

Very good video, I'll try Nix

The final flake is missing and it would help me a lot

Still experimental ? :/

I have to deal with nix and nixos every working day, and honestly at first I hated it, and then I gave it a chance, and after two years I still hate it😅 No or awful docs, fancy functional language, heavy disk usage, incompatibilities with other tools (save god for allowing me to use npm directly without nix), no debugging and most useless error messages. Something I could have done in a few hours in Docker/ansible etc now takes me 2 weeks of full-time work on nix

can you manage ssh keys from nix? like store them encrypted and decrypt on install

I've been very tempted with Nix and nix-darwin in particular, However, besides the steep learning curve and the amount of complexity introduced, I'm not really able to find someone how can in plain English give me the cons of using nix-darwin. Surely, there must be some. What about the non-standard FHS? What kind of troubles may that introduce? What are the resource penalty, surely there must be some memory penalty for storing all the snapshots? I willing to dip my toes into Nix but I'm afraid that this is just some hype train that may pass in few months

Love the video, but when i try to run the nix run nix-darwin part i keep getting an error: path does not exist?

Edit: I have no idea what i did, but after intializing the dir with git it somehow worked

very nice tutorial, thanks a lot!

I remember nix would thoughtfully create 32 users for you on macOS, right?

I am a linux user too, but i may get a MAC for my first job soon, this video is a life saver at the absolute best time :D

Awesome, waiting for the home manager vid!

what utter capitalist male hen gobbler would know about nix yet still CHOOSE to buy an apple device?!

I tried this a couple of weeks ago and gave up. Not because it was difficult, but because I don't want a dedicated volume for Nix and it's just way overkill, and it can't remove homebrew packages even when removed from your nix configuration. I wouldn't want to control any of the system settings either, so brew bundle is good enough for me. Though I was intrigued by using home-manager to replace stow, but as far as i'm aware it can be used standalone without nix-darwin.

Great video! Looking forward to the follow up!

Cool stuf

what about ssh and git setup?