[k2enemy]

Can you elaborate a bit on how Nix helps you set up your user space?

Do you install software with "nix-env -i package" or do you have a declarative way of doing it? If you use nix-env, how is that better than "brew install package"?

I'm not doubting your setup, I'm just trying to use nix for the same thing and am having a hard time finding the canonical way of doing a declarative user setup.

[ben0x539]

For me the part that I'm saying nix-env -i rather than editing a config file and nix-whatever --read-the-config-file-again isn't really a big deal. It's just a cute tool to author and maintain user environments, I'm sure I could, like, define a single package that just depends on and exposes all the packages I actually want installed and call that my declarative user environment but I'm not sure what that's actually gaining me.

Declarative or not, I'm still gonna get the advertised benefits of Nix like, say, having some confidence that I got all the dependencies specified properly if my stuff builds, easily customizing packages by overriding specific bits, and coping with arbitrary version requirements really easily.

I'm sure someone who's more used to configuring homebrew has a different perspective there, but it definitely seems preferable to taking over /usr/local and rotating things in and out of there as I switch between projects or w/e.