Home sweet home.nix

This is the place for my shell (zsh), terminal emulator (alacritty), window manager (xmonad), editor (emacs) configuration and many more workflow improvements & shortcuts (git aliases, fzf, z).

I used to symlink configurations from the home directory into this repository to keep them maintainable, but have now migrated to home-manager on NixOS for (eventually) a full declarative experience. This allows me to easily update and rollback between generations of my whole user environment, as well as modularizing host-specific configs.

Install

On NixOS

1. Follow installation instructions until nixos-install
2. Make sure you have mounted /, /boot, /nix and /home into /mnt.
3. Do a nixos-install --flake github:ch1bo/dotfiles?submodules=1#<host>, set passwords using nixos-enter and reboot.
4. Rebuild system via nixos-rebuild --flake ".?submodules=1" switch

Not on NixOS

Using home-manager and the user profile to install things from nixpkgs usually works quite well, but applications with strong ties into the system are not as straight-forward to set up. The following list contains programs I usually require to be on the "system-level":

• slock - requires root via setuid, maybe a wrapper similar to NixOS helps?
• nautilus - uses gvfs for mounting file systems, which seems not to work (out of the box) when using from nixpkgs
• dconf - to configure GTK etc.
• pcscd / opensc - for smartcard support.

NOTE: For NixOS this are essentially the required parts of a host's configuration.nix.

After installing these dependencies, it's just:

1. Install nix
2. nix-shell --run home-manager switch -f hosts/<host>/home.nix

First steps at home

• Setup syncthing / nextcloud and sync keepass and org into ~/sync.
• Fetch yubikey and gpg --receive-key 0x59FAA903C906659A && gpg --card-status (and chmod 700 ~/.gnupg).
• Prepare doom emacs using doom sync and all-the-icons-install-fonts (in emacs).
• Add mail credentials to secrets service, initialize and receive mails:

  secret-tool store --label='Mail ncoding.at' \
    port 465 \
    host mail.ncoding.at \
    user sebastian.nagel@ncoding.at
  mu init -m ~/mail --my-address=sebastian.nagel@ncoding.at
  mu index
  offlineimap -o
  

• Sign in to Firefox sync.
• Generate nix-index.
• Setup auto-type and minimization in keepassxc.

TODO / Next steps

• Flake-based nixos configurations (no symlinking)
• Make independent of "" (using nix flakes)
• Do auto-upgrades from CI builds (with ways to go back)
• Deploy scripts (or colmena)
• Upload secrets from bitwarden to machines?
• Modularize into proper topics
  • Re-integrate home config with system configuration.nix
  • DRY and modularize system configuration properly between systems
• Declarative syncthing setup
• Drop dual use support (only nixos)
  • Get rid of the dependencies (above)
• Add tooling to "swap" dotfiles like https://github.com/hlissner/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/hey
• Theme rofi
• New terminal emulator
• Clean up with XDG and have proper mime associations
• Reduce "first steps at home" (above)
• Set zen settings / search engines declaratively
• Evaluate nushell
• Look into niri

Inspired by

• https://github.com/ryan4yin/nix-config
• https://github.com/hlissner/dotfiles
• https://github.com/jkachmar/dotnix
• https://github.com/fzakaria/nix-home
• https://github.com/holman/dotfiles