Plongitudes' dotfiles

Nix + home-manager, one flake, driving all machines. The whole thing is declarative: flake.nix is the source of truth, and a single home-manager switch rebuilds the entire user environment out of it — shell, prompt, editor, CLI tooling, dotfiles, the lot.

What you get

Reproducible, not just "documented"

The old version of this repo was a pile of files plus a bootstrap script that imperatively glued them into place. This one is a flake. Every package, every config file, every symlink is declared in home/common/default.nix (+ shell.nix), pinned by flake.lock. Two machines run the same closure, so "works on my laptop" and "works on the server" are the same statement. No drift, no "wait, which version of node did I install here."

Live-editable where it actually matters

Full reproducibility usually means your configs live read-only in the Nix store, and every tweak needs a rebuild. That's miserable for the two files I fiddle with constantly, so those are symlinked straight back into the repo: aliases.zsh and ~/.config/nvim. Edit them in place, re-source (sa/va) or reload nvim, done — no switch required. Everything else is nix-managed in-store, where it belongs. lazy.nvim can still write its lockfile because the nvim dir is a live symlink, and that lockfile is committed, so reproducibility holds.

One flake, every machine

flake.nix carries a homeConfigurations entry for macOS (and nix-on-linux) machines and a nixosConfigurations entry for nixOS. Same default.nix feeds both, with pkgs.stdenv.isDarwin guarding the handful of things that differ. Hop between them and the shell feels identical, because it is identical — same zsh, same oh-my-posh prompt, same mise runtimes, same fd/eza/bat/ripgrep/gh/etc., all from Nix.

Pragmatic about Homebrew

Nix builds from source. For small, fast-compiling CLI tools, that cost is almost free and you get the reproducibility win. For heavier (ffmpeg, imagemagick) or other GUI apps, Homebrew's prebuilt bottles are prefereable; especially on a storage-tight laptop where you might not want a 2.8 GiB source build for a GUI front-end. So there's a deliberate split: the reproducible core lives in Nix, the heavy/GUI stuff lives in brew. bootstrap.sh installs the brew set dead last, because Nix and brew don't depend on each other. I'd rather have the deterministic half working before the imperative half gets a chance to prompt for sudo.

Installation

bootstrap.sh

Fresh machine? Call bootstrap.sh. It installs Xcode Command Line Tools (macOS), then Nix. The Determinate installer has flakes on by default, and they survive OS upgrades. We then clone this repo to ~/.dotfiles, and run the first home-manager switch. That switch is where the real work happens: every symlink, the whole shell, mise, oh-my-posh, the CLI toolchain. On macOS it finishes by installing the Homebrew set.

Download it and read it before you run it. It's short.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plongitudes/dotfiles/master/bootstrap.sh > bootstrap.sh
vi bootstrap.sh
./bootstrap.sh

The brew formulae/casks in bootstrap.sh should be altered to taste, unless you're me, in which case you're already set.

Day to day

Once it's live, three commands carry most of the weight (all defined in aliases.zsh):

• switch — rebuild from the flake. Picks the right config by hostname and pipes the build through nom so you get a live progress tree instead of a long silence.
• nixie — quiet status probe: what's out of date, what would change, without the build noise.
• ns <query> — fuzzy-search nixpkgs / home-manager / NixOS options right in the terminal (via nix-search-tv).

Caveats and gotchas

• Opinionated and Specific Everything here is fairly heavily to my own prefs — zshrc, the prompt, the app list, but very especially the neovim config. Fork it, gut it, make it yours. Or don't.
• Xcode CLT prompt (macOS). On a fresh Mac, bootstrap.sh triggers the Command Line Tools GUI installer and then exits; let that finish, then re-run. Everything after is unattended until brew.
• Login shell is manual. home-manager installs zsh into the Nix profile but won't chsh you into it — that needs root and an /etc/shells entry. bootstrap.sh prints the two commands you'll need.
• The VM is different. non-nixOS machines provision via nixos-rebuild, not this script. bootstrap.sh is the macOS (and generic Nix-on-Linux) path.

Thanks

• The nix-community folks for home-manager, which is doing 90% of the work here.
• Determinate Systems for a Nix installer that doesn't fall over on the next macOS update.
• The Homebrew crew — still the right tool for the heavy, GUI half.
• Every dotfiles repo I've ever trawled through for ideas.