I have been using NixOS for about a year now. My daily driver is a Mac Mini M4, which I manage with nix (the package manager). I also have several NixOS machines that host my homelab, and a NixOS cirtual machine that I have started to use as my own fully-customized development environment.

All that said, the majority of my time using Nix & NixOS has involved minimal exploration of modules. I relied heavily on the use of the usual suspects: home-manager for managing my user packages and dotfiles and nix-darwin for declarative management of my MacOS environment. I never found an ideal replacement for my Neovim configurations, so I relied on the trusty mkOutOfStoreSymlink.

More recently, I have been exploring more modules and alternative approaches to managing my nix environments, and have been pleasantly surprised by what I have found out in the community.

For the Neovim User - nvf⌗

The problem⌗

First, let’s address the ugly duckling in my configurations - Neovim. While I could have opted for management via other modules like nixvim, I always found them to be lacking for one reason or another.

Here’s a few of the common headaches I always ran into when attempting to use other modules:

  • Lack of flexibility. It can be quite tedious (and sometimes downright frustrating) to hunt down if certain options that were easily accessible in traditional environments via Lua were exposed in Nix module options. Writing overlays of the module just to enable a single feature was just not for me. If that’s your truth, I respect your dedication.
  • Multiple configuration languages. Most modules that attept to avoid the flexibility issue above opt for management of configuration in Lua directly. This is certainly more flexible, but then my configurations were all written in Nix language except Neovim, which I managed in Lua seperately. I found the context switching was quite annoying, and simply wrapping Lua files felt far less “magical” than the Nix experience is with other configurations.
  • Dependencies and portability. Many of the modules also required the use of home-manager or other global binaries, which was not what I was looking for. I wanted to be able to configure my Neovim without needing to manually pull in different modules just to expose options or have dependencies available.

The solution⌗

Enter nvf by the amazingly talented raf (aka NotAShelf). nvf manages your Neovim configurations in Nix language, but allows for the use of raw Lua when it is needed via the mkLuaInline generator. It is available as a standalone Nix module (or as a Home-Manager module, for those who wish to stick with Home-Manager; though be sure to read the next section for an up-and-coming module which may change your mind!).

There’s also a very comprehnsive list of existing support for Neovim plugins from maintainers as well as the community - with more plugins and options being added all the time. However, nvf also provides the ability to bring your own plugins and modules from npins or nixpkgs with ease, meaning you are never dependent on the option being exposed in the module or needing to write overlays for that one perfect configuration.

Documentation is another pervasive problem in the Nix community; paradigms are changing frequently, and often documentation is not caught up with what is proper that week. I was pleasantly surprised how well-documented the module was, and in just an hour I had a fully functional Neovim configuration up and running! The documentation is built out of the module directly, so there’s never problems with things being out of date or broken when trying to RTFM.

Finally - let’s talk about contributions. I found myself in a very niche situation one day where I needed to configure the placement of my diagnostic icons in neotree, but found the option did not exist. The contribution guidelines for nvf are also excellent, and I was able to quickly get new customizations implemented into the module for others to use.

Try it out⌗

If my little plug has you curious, you can run nvf without needing to modify your configurations at all with the help of the nix run command:

nix run github:notashelf/nvf

To see just how much nvf can do, try running the maximal version. It’ll take a little longer to run, but you’ll see many more features for a super-powered Neovim:

nix run github:notashelf/nvf#maximal

My personal configurations fall somewhere between the default and maximal examples. You can view my nvf configurations in my dotfiles.

For the Home-Manager Hater - hjem⌗

Let’s talk about Home-Manager. It is one of the largest and most popular modules in the Nix ecosystem. If you are just starting to use Nix or NixOS, one of the first recommendations you will probably come across is to use Home-Manager.

I want to first start off by saying that Home-Manager is fantastic for beginners, and exposes a massive number of options for various packages that people use every single day. There is a point in time in which every single host I configured in my flake used Home-Manager. I do not think Home-Manager is a bad module, but I think it is a bad module for me and my preferred configurations.

As your experience and comfortability with your Nix configuration improve, you’ll begin to notice how much your system evaluation & build times seem to be slower and slower. If you’ve tried to contribute to Home-Manager (which I admittedly have not, but I do chat regularly with folks that do), you might have found their methods bloated and more convuluted than necessary to manage something like a simple configuration file.

Between the bloated module, slower rebuild times, and difficult to customize options, I simply had enough. I saw a new module called hjem mentioned in a Nix thread on the Ghostty Discord server, and I immediately dove in.

hjem is a far cry from Home-Manager - it uses native syntax for your configuration files (whatever that is for your package - TOML, YAML, or any other language) and links them with systemd-tmpfiles. There’s work ongoing to use new linkers for better non-NixOS support (such as smfh).

I know I just got finished singing the praises of nvf for not requiring Lua, the effectively “native” configuration language for Neovim, and now I am singing the opposite tune - using native configuration syntax for all other packages. I’m not sure if it is simply my own exhaustion with trying to hunt for specific options exposed in Home-Manager for years every time I want to change my configuration, my personal dislike of Lua, or just simply rose-colored glasses, but I find it refreshing to have what is effectively a Nix-ified stow system for my configurations.

I can read directly from the documentation for any package, update my configuration file and rebuild, and that file is immediately in my store. No more needing to consult Home-Manager documentation or thinking about writing overlays. Speaking of rebuilds, I noticed my system rebuild time dropped dramatically (almost ~2x faster) when I removed Home-Manager.

I will caveat my overwhelmingly positive review of hjem by saying I do still daily drive a macOS system, and hjem does not currently support macOS (there’s no systemd to use as a linker). I am currently stuck using Home-Manager for my macOS system until the new linker(s) make their way into the light of day.

If you’re curious about hjem, you can check it out here.

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That’s all I have for now! Hopefully my experience with these modules has at least given you something to think about for your own Nix configurations. Cheers!