Thoughts and Writeups

I think Nix is really cool. Nix the package manager and functional configuration language is most often associated with NixOS the Linux distro, but nix-darwin makes it almost as easy to declaratively configure macOS as it is to configure NixOS installations. Even if you’ll still relying on Homebrew for package management and never touch nixpkgs, I’d say that Nix with nix-darwin provides the best way to manage packages and system configuration on macOS.

Unfortunately, the resources for getting started and integrating different parts of the Nix ecosystem are not particularly approachable for beginners. When I started out I would often use GitHub’s code search to trawl through other people’s configs and try different snippets until I found what actually worked. Inspired by Arne Bahlo’s Emacs from Scratch series, I wanted to create a guide to help folks get started with Nix on macOS from scratch, step by step.

Throughout this series we’ll create a declarative system configuration with Nix where you can manage anything from your shell aliases to what VSCode extensions you have installed to running daemons with launchd. We’ll build up to this incrementally: by the end of this post, you’ll have Nix installed on your system and be able to declaratively install system-level packages from either Nixpkgs or Homebrew.

I got a new computer recently and decided to take the plunge setting it up with Nix¹. I wrote up a snippet on how I set everything up and you can find my whole configuration on GitHub. I’ve only scratched the surface of what Nix can do – In this post I wanted to focus on my subjective impression of Nix so far and why I feel I’ve been enjoying it.

Pablo Picasso was one of the most famous modern artists of the 20th century. While many of his paintings border on the abstract, he sharpened his artisitc skill on more realistic and traditional styles. Novelty and creativity are important parts of great art, but just as necessary to making anything great is the technical ability to take an idea and represent it in the real world — even abstract expressionists could paint unbelieveably realistic landscapes if they felt the need.

I’m certainly no artist, but the lesson here applies more broadly: practicing technical skills on their own is an important part of the creative process.

This is my generative AI take. I’m sure there are many like it, but this one is mine.

When it comes to social trends I’m often on the far side of Moore’s Chasm. I signed up for Snapchat a year after all of my friends, and joined Instagram two years after everyone else. So it was only appropriate that it took weeks after the internet was set on fire for me to see the value that applications of Large Language Models like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot bring to programming. But now that I’ve given it a real shot, it’s clear to me that if you have enough knowledge to ask specific tactical questions about a well-defined technology, framework or library, ChatGPT can be a huge force multiplier.

One of my first posts on this blog in 2020 was about my experience switching from VSCode to Emacs for all of my text/code editing work. I still agree with all of the benefits to Emacs I wrote about back then, and my posts on Obsidian show my respect for org-mode as a format and the ecosystem around it – especially org-agenda. However, as you might have noticed when the file extension on my posts switched from .org back to .md, I’ve moved on from Emacs for now. But I’m happy with how I’ve moved my good habits back to VSCode. Spending time on config gave me more confidence in my ability to configure software I use to my liking, and make software work for me rather than make me work for the software.