cfg

My NixOS system configuration.

What's in the box

Category	Programs
Terminals	WezTerm
Code Editors	Helix
Shells	Fish
Window Managers	Hyprland

Docs

dofiles management

The configuration files for programs are written using two methods:

home-manager

Which provides modules for configuring many popular programs.

out-of-store symlinks, using mkOutOfStoreSymlink

This method is especially comfortable for configurations in specific languages (like lua for WezTerm), that way we can write the config in the language we want (thus leveraging language server support, syntax highlighting, etc.), or configs that provide hot-reload (like WezTerm and Hyprland).

At the time of writing, the mkOutOfStoreSymlink function lacks any kind of documentation, so briefly:

Using this function it is possible to make home.file create a symlink to a path outside the Nix store. For example, a Home Manager configuration containing

home.file."foo".source = config.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink ./bar;

would upon activation create a symlink ~/foo that points to the absolute path of the bar file relative the configuration file.

The commit message of the commit adding this function

Which means that it will create a symlink to the given path, instead of a read only symlink pointing to a copy of the file in the nix store.

This gives us the ability to edit the config file in the nix configuration directory, in a way that will be synced immediately with the actual config file (in ~/.config for example), without the need of nixos-rebuild switch.

It's important to notice that if we use flakes (which we are), we need to pass the path as a string of the absolute path ("/fullpath" instead of ../file), according to this post.

Fortunately, this can be simplified by using a helper function, adapted from here from this comment. The helper is located in the helpers module (modules/common/helpers.nix), and can be used like so:

# home/rotemh/common/core/wezterm/default.nix

{
  pkgs,
  config,
  ...
}: {
  home.packages = with pkgs; [
    wezterm
  ];

  xdg.configFile."wezterm" = {
    source = config.lib.meta.mkMutableSymlink ./wezterm;
    recursive = true;
  };
}

Note, the helper uses the flake field in the hostSpec set, defined in the host-spec module, which is supposed to hold the path to the directory of the system configuration flake (the directory of this README.md). Currently, it's defined as:

flake = lib.mkOption {
  type = lib.types.str;
  description = "The directory of this flake in the file system (not in store)";
  default = let home = config.hostSpec.home; in "${home}/cfg";
};

So if you have the flake somewhere else in your filesystem, override this field.