Yak Shavers Yearly 5

Wed, 04 Nov 2026 19:14:13 +0100

tl;dr

With home manager it really becomes easy to make a deterministic, version controlled tooling setup.

home manager

Recently I switched jobs, this also meant switching laptops. In the past, I would probably have to spend at least a few hours, maybe a few days, for getting my terminal setup just like I want to.
But I also switched to home manager:

Home Manager is a Nix-powered tool for reproducible management of the contents of users’ home directories. This includes programs, configuration files, environment variables and, well… arbitrary files.

Which meant that I only had to get my home manager config, install nix and after a home-manager switch everything felt right at home.

So instead of having to remember which packages I have installed with homebrew, I have a section in config like this:

home.packages = [
    pkgs.age
    pkgs.argocd
    pkgs.aria2
    pkgs.atuin
    pkgs.bat
    pkgs.bun
    pkgs.claude-code
    pkgs.cmake
    pkgs.codex
    pkgs.cilium-cli
    pkgs.gitui
    pkgs.ghq
    pkgs.go
    pkgs.jq
    pkgs.jjui
    pkgs.jujutsu
    pkgs.k3d
    pkgs.k9s
    pkgs.kind
    pkgs.kustomize
    pkgs.kubectl
    pkgs.kubelogin-oidc
    pkgs.kubectx
    pkgs.lsd
    pkgs.lz4
    pkgs.zoxide
  ]
  ++ (pkgs.lib.optional (!isDarwin) pkgs.esphome)

Which manages all CLI programs I like to have available. Installing or removing a package is just as simple as editing a line in that file and doing a home-manager switch. And because of nix flakes it is deterministic as well. If I update my sources using nix flake update --flake . and some packages break, I can just do a git revert and everything works again. (too bad that I actually need this sometimes, because on macos the packages do seem to break occasionally)

neovim

And it’s not just useful for managing installed packages, it can also configure them for you. My complete nvim setup is managed with home-manager, which is ALSO deterministic. I no longer run into updated plugins that break, everything is pinned and I’m very happy.

{
  imports = [
    ./core.nix
    ./colorscheme.nix
    ./plugins.nix
    ./treesitter.nix
  ];

  programs.neovim = {
    enable = true;
    defaultEditor = true;
    viAlias = true;
    vimAlias = true;
    vimdiffAlias = true;
  };
}

plugins = with pkgs.vimPlugins; [
      presence-nvim
      lsp_signature-nvim
      auto-save-nvim
      neo-tree-nvim
      nui-nvim
      plenary-nvim
      nvim-web-devicons
      bufferline-nvim
      which-key-nvim
      toggleterm-nvim
      telescope-nvim
      dashboard-nvim
      snacks-nvim
      mason-nvim
      mason-lspconfig-nvim
      nvim-lspconfig
      schema-companion-nvim
      hop-nvim
      vim-repeat
      tiny-glimmer-nvim
    ];

(obviously this is not everything, but you get the gist)

So when I opened vim on my fresh laptop, I was greeted with this nice splash screen:

nix on Erwin's stuff

Yak Shavers Yearly 5

tl;dr

home manager

neovim