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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • anything I tried getting from their repos was always way further behind the mac OS homebrew or Debian apt versions.

    Nixpkgs are the most up to date of any package respiratory source

    It is likely that you were using the current ‘stable’ channel that does not have the very latest packages. The ‘unstable’ channel does have the very latest packages and is what I think most people use.

    nixOS is really slick in concept, but has a steep learning curve to get it properly customized as a daily driver. The learned skills don’t really translate outside the nix realm either, so I decided it was too much effort for my use case. I love this concept as a way to build reproducable servers or workstations tho, so I’ll def be playing with it again.

    I totally agree, I wish it was easier to learn.






















  • NixOS:

    • Largest and most up to date package repository (no need for flatpack/appimage/snap ect)
    • Reproducible
    • Declarative
    • Rollbacks you can select at boot time
    • No dependency conflicts

    I think it will easily be the number 1 distro if/when they can :

    • the steep learning curve (e.g. have a gui installer EDIT: As in a GUI software centre)
    • documentation
    • have more tools use nixos and have nixos in mind (e.g. there are a couple of tools that didn’t work for me because of specific C libraries not beeing present/configured on nixos that are present on other distros. some libraries implicitly expect these to be present).


  • One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that not moving between mouse and keyboard so much reduces the risk of getting an RSI. So even if it didn’t make you faster it would still probably be worth it to find a keyboard based workflow.

    I use Helix and would suggest you try it (at least to start off with) as it is easier to learn than vim and does not require plugins or a complex config. To answer your question I will go from the less to more advanced/complex:

    1. Move a line to a new position in the file/another file (takes a couple of seconds)
      1. x then d to select a line (pressing N times will select N lines) and delete it (delete will also copy to the clipboard)
      2. navigate the cursor to the new location
      3. p to paste in a new
    2. Navigating around a file:
      1. jumping to a function/class definition by pressing g then d when on a function/class usage.
      2. getting a list and navigating to class/function calls when the cursor is on a class/function definition by pressing g then r.
    3. Multi cursor editing - I use this to make edits to multiple places at once. I most recently used this to extract the names of 30 tables that are used in a SQL file. This probably took ~5 seconds and I barely thought about it. To do this I used:
      1. % to select the entire files contents
      2. s to search
      3. typed "FROM "
      4. pressed enter to create cursor at all locations matching the search
      5. v then g then l to select the rest of the line
      6. space+y to copy to the system clipboard.
      7. paste into a document where I needed to list the tables
    4. Using a terminal workspace manager (zellij) with helix and a git tui app (gitui) so that I can easily make code changes, commit, push, ,run tests, move to a new repo and more without leaving the keyboard.

    There is actually a helix community on programming.dev: helix@programming.dev