FAQ

Do you intend on making this an official NixOS application?

Yes! I will be writing an RFC to see if people are interested in this.

That's my ultimate goal, anyway.

What about nh? Isn't that better since it supports more OSes?

nh is a more popular application in this realm, perhaps because it looked prettier due to the earlier nix-output-monitor and nvd integration, and is significantly older than nixos-cli.

However, I prefer to keep the focus on NixOS here, while nh tries to be a unified rebuild + switch manager for multiple OSes. That's the difference.

nixos-cli also has more features than nh for NixOS-based machines, so that's a plus.

What about home-manager and nix-darwin? Will you support those systems?

They are fundamentally separate projects with roughly similar surfaces, so no. I am a heavy user of both projects, though, so I may write my own darwin and hm CLIs that roughly mirror this.

Think about this:

• home-manager has to work in the user context, while NixOS works in the system one.
• nix-darwin doesn't interact with boot scripts, while NixOS does.

Among a slew of other differences. The rebuild + switch workflow may be the same, but the options are different, and I'm lazy. So no.

Can the option search work with other sources?

It's theoretically possible, as long as the modules can be evaluated with lib.evalModules. As such, home-manager, nix-darwin, and even flake-parts are possible to do!

However, this tends to significantly increase evaluation time, and will depend on the system to eval. I plan to break out the option search UI into a separate project that can be more generalized, and add it back to this one as a plugin of sorts.

More questions?

File an issue! Perhaps it's important enough to add to this FAQ as well.