hallettj

Sharing the link because it took me a minute to find it: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/fuzzel

I’m also a PaperWM fan. For switching I mostly use spatial window-switching controls: Meta+ left/right to switch windows, page up/page down to switch workspaces. Plus I use Gnome overview’s search-driven app finder, and Advanced Alt-Tab Switcher but only for its fuzzy search feature to switch to specific windows within an app.

PaperWM has an option to hide windows in a “scratch” layer. I put chat and music programs there, and summon them with AATS.

I have an ultrawide monitor, and I put a terminal and editors side-by-side in a ¼-¾ ratio. I set browser windows to ½ width. Those ratios let me see important parts of a browser window next to the editor if I slide the terminal out of view to partially expose a browser on the other side. Or I can move the terminal next to the browser and see both fully.

The first computer I used was (I think) a CP/M system that could run BASIC, and I used to use it to play Castle in the early '90s.

The first computer of my own was a Gateway laptop for college in 2002. It was the first Wi-Fi device I laid hands on. I immediately set it up to play music to wake me up in the morning, and I listened to the fans running all night.

I sometimes write a flake with those 4 lines of Nix code, and it comes out just messy enough that tbh I’m happier adding an input to handle that. But I recently learned that the nixpkgs flake exports the lib.* helpers through nixpkgs.lib (as opposed to nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system}.lib) so you can call helpers before specifying a system. And nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs is kinda close enough to flake-utils.lib.eachSystem that it might make a better solution.

Like where with flake-utils you would write,

flake-utils.lib.eachSystem [ "x86_64-linux" "aarch64-darwin" ] (system:
let
  pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
in
{
  devShells.default = pkgs.mkShell {
    nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [
      hello
    ];
  };
})

Instead you can use genAttrs,

let
  forAllSystems = nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs [ "x86_64-linux" "aarch64-darwin" ];
  pkgs = forAllSystems (system:
    nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system}
  );
in
{
  devShells = forAllSystems (system: {
    default = pkgs.${system}.mkShell {
      nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs.${system}; [
        hello
      ];
    };
  });
}

It’s more verbose, but it makes the structure of outputs more transparent.

I want to make a small correction - this is not true:

iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.

nixos-rebuild behaves like most package managers: it makes new packages available immediately, and restarts relevant systemd services. Like other distros you have to reboot to run a new kernel.

And cleaning up Steam games is as issue with most distros too. But I kinda see your point.

Btw Nix (both NixOS and the Nix package manager running in other distros) has this feature where you can run packages without “installing” them if you just want to run them once:

$ nix shell nixpkgs#package-name

That puts you in a shell with one or more packages temporarily installed. The packages are downloaded to /nix/store/ as usual, but will get garbage-collected sometime after you close the shell.