I made a mistake with not reading CHANGELOGs for all my packages in Neovim this week. This sent me down a small rabbit hole trying to fix all the things.
What happened is I ran :PackerUpdate which, pulls the latest version of Packer packages, good, updates! But... Telescope has a new requirement on main branch that requires Neovim 0.9.0. The problem is that the latest NixPkgs for Neovim right now is 0.8.1. I ran to google, tried to set an overlay to use neovim-nightly, but that didn't work. If you recall in Dotfiles - My 2022 Way I'm not actually using NixOS so (please correct me if I'm wrong) overlays don't work. I tried specifing a version in my programs.nix, I tried a bunch of other things at 1AM that I don't remember anymore.
Almost ripped it all out just to use Nvim 0.9.0 on this machine until NixPkgs has updated the repo. I decided that was the wrong idea, and went to sleep.
Tonight, I was able to figure out that in Packer, you can pin a commit!
It's clear in the docs, but I was trying to fix it at the Nix level, so I didn't immediately think of this, even though at my last job, Tidelift, I was doing package pinning analysis! Derp.
So, I added commit="c1a2af0" to my use statment in plugins.lua and Telescope started working again without a warning, or issue. Commit.
That wasn't the only problem though. In my infinite wisdom, I followed some reddit posts that I won't link to, that suggested deleting ~/.local/share/nvim and rerunning PackerInstall, the problem there -- my tree-sitter configs are in my nix files.
This is an issue I need to look at later, but in my programs.nix file, I some reason have two entries of plugins =. I had to uncomment the first one where I inject tree-sitter, and comment out the second setting. Then rebuild my nix flakes.
After that,I had to comment the first, uncomment the second, and rebuild with withAllGrammars config.
This worked, I had my rust tree-sitter configs working, but was missing rust-analyzer.
That's in Mason! So I ran :Mason, found rust-analyzer slapped that i button, and I finally had my system back after 2 days of issues.
This was mostly a blogpost so I can reference back to it in the future, but hopefully at least _someone_ learns to pin your dang nvim Packages!
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.