Dotfiles

These dotfiles are managed using Nix and Home Manager. Most config files are kept as plain text in modules/<application_name>/.

Installation

If you're reading this you'll probably want to take a look at the individual config files rather than setting up the entire dotfiles repo with Home Manager, but this can be done as follows:

git clone https://github.com/robbert-vdh/dotfiles.git ~/.dotfiles
~/.dotfiles/bin/update-dotfiles

Emacs

My Emacs configuration is based on Doom Emacs, which needs to be updated separately from the main Home Manager config. The files in modules/emacs/doom can simply be copied or symlinked to wherever Doom is installed.

Nix quirks

Nix, flakes, and Home Manager do 90% of the work well and the other 10% gets really messy. This is a (likely incomplete list) of the workarounds used in this Home Manager config for future reference:

• The bin/update-dotfiles script wraps around home-manager switch with a couple additional options:
  • Home Manager is told to specifically use this the flake from this repo's root so we don't need to symlink the home manager configuration to ~/.config/home-manager first.
  • The flake is run in impure mode so we can pass the path to this repo to the flake through the DOTFILES_DIR environment variable.
  • NIX_CONF_DIR is also overridden to point to the Nix config in this repo. This is needed for the nix cli to work so the nix cli can be enabled.
  • The script pulls changes from this repo and also makes sure that there are no untracked files in modules/. Those wouldn't be included in the flake which can be kind of confusing.
• Some config files, like Emacs', are symlinked to this repo using absolute paths, completely bypassing the Nix store. That is needed for them to be mutable, but Home Manager+flakes makes doing so incredibly difficult. That's why the aforementioned DOTFILES_DIR environment variable is needed, and why Home Manager needs to be ran in impure mode.
• modules/pacman/default.nix defines an activation script that symlinks some files to /etc. This is of course not something natively supported or encouraged by Home Manager, but it works.