I had a bit of a "Tyrel you know nothing" moment today with some commandline tooling.
I have been an avid user of ZSH for a decade now, but recently I tried to swap to fish shell.
Along the years, I've maintained a lot of different iterations of dotfiles, and shell aliases/functions.
I was talking to a friend [citation needed] about updating from exa to eza and then noticed I didn't have my aliases loaded, so I was still using ls directly, as I have alias ls="exa -lhFgxUm --git --time-style long-iso --group-directories-first" in my .shell_aliases file.
I did this by showing the following output:
$ which ls
/usr/bin/ls
Because I expected it to show me which alias was being pointed to by ls.
My friend pointed out that "Which doesn't show aliases, it only points to files" to which I replied along the lines of "What? No way, I've used which to show me aliases and functions loads of times."
And promptly sent a screenshot of my system NOT showing that for other aliases I have set up. Things then got conversational and me being confused, to the point of me questioning if "Had I ever successfully done that? Maybe my macbook is set up differrently" and went and grabbed that.
Friend then looked at the man page for which, and noticed that there's the --read-alias and --read-functions flags on which, and I didn't have those set.
I then swapped over to bash "Maybe it's a bash thing only? I'm using Fish".
Nope, still nothing! Then went to google, and it turns out that ZSH is what has this setup by default.
Thank you "Althorion" from Stackoverflow for settling my "Yes you've done this before" confusion.
It turns out that ZSH's which is equivalent to the ZSH shell built-in whence -c which shows aliases and functions.
After running /usr/bin/zsh and sourcing my aliases (I don't have a zshrc file anymore, I need to set that back up), I was able to settle my fears and prove to myself that I wasn't making things up. There is a which which shows you which aliases you have set up, which is default for ZSH.
$ which ls
ls: aliased to exa -lhFgxUm --git --time-style long-iso --group-directories-first
New Year's eve eve, my main portable computer crashed. Rebooting to Safe mode, I could mount this MacBook's hard drive long enough to SCP the files over the network to my server, but I had to start that over twice because it fell asleep. I don't have access to rsync in the "Network Recovery Mode" it seems - maybe I should look to see if next time I can install things, it's moot now.
I spent all January 1st evening working on learning how Nix works. Of course, I started with Nix on macOS (intel at least) so I had to also learn how nix-darwin works. I have my dotfiles set up to use Nix now, rather than an INSTALL.sh file that just sets a bunch of symlinks.
I played around for a litle bit with different structures, but what I ended up with by the end of the weekend was two bash scripts (still working on makefile, env vars are being funky) one for each operating system rebuild-macos.sh and rebuild-ubuntu.sh. For now I'm only Nixifying one macOS system and two Ubuntu boxes. Avoiding it on my work m1 Mac laptop, as I don't want to have to deal with managing synthetic.conf and mount points on a work managed computer. No idea how JAMF and Nix will fight.
My filetree currently looks like (trimmed out a host and a bunch of files in home/)
.
├── home
│ ├── bin/
│ ├── config/
│ ├── gitconfig
│ ├── gitignore
│ ├── gpg/
│ ├── hushlogin
│ └── ssh/
├── hosts/
│ ├── _common/
│ │ ├── fonts.nix
│ │ ├── home.nix
│ │ ├── programs.nix
│ │ └── xdg.nix
│ ├── ts-tl-mbp/
│ │ ├── brew.nix
│ │ ├── default.nix
│ │ ├── flake.lock
│ │ ├── flake.nix
│ │ ├── home-manager.nix
│ │ └── home.nix
│ └── x1carbon-ubuntu/
│ ├── default.nix
│ ├── flake.lock
│ ├── flake.nix
│ ├── home-manager.nix
│ └── home.nix
├── rebuild-macos.sh
└── rebuild-ubuntu.sh
Under hosts/ as you can see, I have a brew.nix file in my macbook pro's folder. This is how I install anything in homebrew. In my flake.nix for my macos folder I am using home-manager, nix-darwin, and nixpkgs. I provide this brew.nix to my darwinConfigurations and it will install anything I put in my brew nixfile.
I also have a _common directory in my hosts, this is things that are to be installed on EVERY machine. Things such as bat, wget, fzf, fish, etc. along with common symlinks and xdg-config links. My nvim and fish configs are installed and managed this way. Rather than need to maintain a neovim config for every different system, in the nix way, I can just manage it all in _common/programs.nix.
This is not "The Standard Way" to organize things, if you want more inspiration, I took a lot from my friend Andrey's Nixfiles. I was also chatting with him a bunch during this, so I was able to get three systems up and configured in a few days. After the first ubuntu box was configured, it was super easy to manage my others.
My home/ directory is where I store my config files. My ssh public keys, my gpg public keys, my ~/.<dotfiles> and my ~/.config/<files>. This doesn't really need any explaination, but as an added benefit is I also decided to LUA-ify my nvim configs the same weekend. But that's a story for another time.
I am at this time choosing not to do NixOS - and relying on Ubuntu for managing my OS. I peeked into Andrey's files, and I really don't want to have to manage a full system configuration, drivers, etc. with Nix. Maybe for the future - when my Lenovo X1 Carbon dies and I need to reinstall that though.