[aidenn0]

Not who you're replying to, but I just launch the IDE from the shell. e.g. for running qtcreator:

  nix-shell -p qtcreator qt5Full gnumake gcc gdb cmake

If I need other libraries in there, I can add them to it. I don't use direnv/lorri, but I assume you would have to relaunch the IDE in the case of adding more dependencies, unless the IDE has nix-shell integration (like an emacs user mentions in a sibling comment).

I made a different way of setting up a development environment[1] that would probably work just as well for e.g. VSCode, that doesn't require restarting the IDE. I did this for lisp development, where dynamically loading libraries during development is fairly idiomatic; it took me about 15 minutes to write, and could probably be adapted for other IDEs as well.

1: https://git.sr.ht/~jasom/nix-lisp-dev/tree