mkenigs · HackerTrans

2 years agodiscuss

Yes I have worked on it and would love to help if you want to poke around! If you have more questions I can answer on our Slack https://go.flox.dev/slack. It's not completely straightforward how it all works

mkenigs

2 years agodiscuss

Hey there! Looks like you may have missed the Nix/Generic and Nix/NixOS tabs at https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/? Do those satisfy the side by side use case you’re talking about?

I think the best way to use fish at the moment is `FLOX_SHELL=zsh flox activate -- fish`. That doesn’t support aliases but should mostly work

Are you hoping to actually hack on the source or just trying to understand how to come up with a workaround? We error for any shell other than bash or zsh somewhere around https://github.com/flox/flox/blob/9e18a3ceaa185006bae95a4827... If you want to take a crack at hacking on it I’d be more than happy to give more background!

mkenigs

2 years agodiscuss

Flox employee here! To start off by addressing how this relates to nix tools:

- Our goal is to be more user friendly. You don't have to learn the Nix expression language or understand nix internals to be successful.

- We've been able to add some opinionation and polish. Some of that is subjective, but some examples are:

  - We have a hybrid imperative/declarative interface. You can `flox install && flox list`, and those changes are reflected in TOML. Whereas with `nix develop` you have to edit a Nix expression

  - `nix develop` drops you into a bash shell, whereas `flox activate` can drop you into a bash or zsh shell (and we plan to add support for fish)

- We support using git to manage environments just like nix tools do, but we've also added the option to share flox environments in ways you can't with any of those tools (flox push/flox pull/flox activate -r) and the ability to view environments in ways we feel can be more user friendly. If you create an account, you can see packages I have in my environment at https://hub.flox.dev/mkenigs/default, or if you have the CLI, you could inspect my environment with `flox list -r mkenigs/default` before using it with `flox activate -r mkenigs/default`. I think that's much more digestible than linking a flake.nix to someone who doesn't know the Nix expression language

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