[sirn]

The power of Nix start when you start building your own ~/.nixpkgs/default.nix (but you don't really need to if you don't want to):

    {
      packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs; rec {
        all = buildEnv {
          name = "all";
          paths = [
            vim
            fish
            gitAndTools.gitFull
          ];
        };
      };
    }
    

This is the Nix package collection. You can install this package with `nix-env -i all`. What does it do? Install vim, install fish, install git. Not much, and easily doable in Homebrew in much fewer keystrokes.

Now imagine you decided that you don't like vim and want to go with emacs. You change the paths to `paths = [ emacs fish gitAndTools.gitFull ]`. Run `nix-env -i all` again. What does it do now? It uninstall vim and install emacs.

Now that you decided you don't like emacs after all and want to go back to vim. You can just run `nix-env --rollback` and it will happily rollback the change it made to the filesystem made by latest nix-env call, as in, restoring vim at where you expect it to be.

This is the declarative nature of Nix. You declare the state you want the package to be (or the whole system, in case of NixOS) and Nix will figure out how to get to that state. default.nix can also do a lot more things, for example, adding custom packages, overriding versions, changing build flags and much more.

Let's say one day you need to clone the whole setup to other machine, you only need to copy this default.nix and run `nix-env -i all` on that machine and everything is reproduced in the way you expected. This default.nix can also be per-project, allowing collaborators to share the same packages (and custom packages).

[bobbyi_settv]

> It uninstall vim and install emacs.

If a package system is well designed, having the package for vim on my system shouldn't be doing any harm even if I'm not currently using it, so the system you are describing isn't really any better than just having a list of packages I want installed in a text file.

[sirn]

That is not the point I want to make. Having both Vim and Emacs doesn't really do any harm. You can even have multiple versions of Vim in the same machine, even with different and incompatible dependency version, and Nix will happily manage that. The point is that with Nix collection, it will try to build the system exactly as described without any kind of side effect.

Using Vim isn't the best example (why would someone want multiple Vim?) but the same apply to languages as well. For example if I want to use Python 3.2, but there are handful of utilities that require 3.3+. I can just install 3.2 to my profile and install those utilities with 3.5 without actually exposing 3.5 to my profile.