TIL: How to Colour Dap Breakpointed Line in Neovim I wanted to change the background colour of the line when it was stopped during debugging using DAP with neovim. To make it easier to see where we are currently breakpointed. We already have a highlight group called DapStopped. Which in my case is defined as: DapStopped = { bg = C.grey }. Then we need to assign the custom highlight group, the key bit being linehl for our use case. ...
TIL: How to Fix Package Binary Collisions on Nix Recently I wanted to use GNU parallel, a nifty little tool we can use to run tasks in parallel, shock horror I know. I already have the moreutils package installed using nix (home-manager). So I added this: home.packages = with pkgs; [ parallel moreutils ] Then I ran the home manager switch like usual, I got the following error. error: builder for '/nix/store/vh6i81xhf6pvybdpall8z8l8y0i6mr8p-home-manager-path. ...
Introduction Typically when we want to install a new OS we use an ISO to create a bootable USB drive. We can then plug this into our device, say laptop, and boot from that USB and install our OS. However, typically you can only put a single ISO on a USB. So what if wanted a USB with say Window, Arch Linux, TailsOS and NixOS how could we do that? ...
TIL: How to Use fzf.fish History Search I use Fish Shell with fzf and fish fzf plugin. I installed fzf using nix and home-manager: { programs.fzf = { enable = true; enableFishIntegration = false; }; } It adds fzf-history-widget script, which is bound to ctrl+r, shell reverse history search. Which we can see when we run this: bind | grep -e fzf-history-widget -e fzf-file-widget Whereas I wanted to use the _fzf_search_history which is made available by that fish fzf plugin. ...
In this post, we will just go over the basics of how we can configure our setup using a git repo, nix flakes and home-manager. I will go over how I structured my nix config. Not an in-depth tutorial Note this will not be an in-depth guide into NixOS/Home Manager itself. That could well be a series on its own. We will just go over the main ways I configure NixOS/Nix and why I do it the way I do. ...
TIL: How to Check if Another Option Is Set in Home Manager (Nix) Recently I was adding sway to my nix config (setup via home-manager). I already had Hyprland config, I wanted both sway and Hyprland to use my waybar config with some slight differences. So basically I want to check if the current host machine is using Sway or Hyprland (I am assuming we will only use one). The main reason for using Sway is my work laptop uses Ubuntu 22. ...
TIL: How to Access System in Home Manager Using Flakes Recently I needed to install devenv using flakes in home-manager. One of the things I needed to pass to was the type of system to install on i.e. "x86_64-linux". So as I temp hack I had something like: inputs.devenv.packages."x86_64-linux".devenv. However I was able to access the system using the pkgs attribute like so: { inputs, pkgs, ... }: { home.packages = [ inputs. ...
TIL: How to Fix tmux-resurrect on NixOS When I moved to NixOS I noticed that tmux-resurrect stop restoring some applications such as man and nvim. Like it used to on my Arch machine. I recently found a solution to my problem (thanks to a lovely chap on the nixos discourse). By adding the following lines to our tmux config: resurrect_dir="$HOME/.tmux/resurrect" set -g @resurrect-dir $resurrect_dir set -g @resurrect-hook-post-save-all 'target=$(readlink -f $resurrect_dir/last); sed "s| --cmd . ...
In this post, I will go over how you can use Cachix’s devenv tool to help create/set up consistent repeatable developer environments. You could use nix flakes if you wanted to as well, without needing another tool. However, I like how devenv provides a few other “tools” within that we can set up from a single devenv.nix file. Such as pre-commit hooks, container support etc. This blog leverages devenv to create/set up its developer environment. ...
TIL: How to Colour Neovim Line Numbers Recently I was trying to configure my own neovim config. I wanted the current line I was onto be coloured slighty differently and also the line number to be white. So it’s easier to see the line number and which line I was on. It was not immediately obvious how to do this and took me long to work out than I’d like to admit 😅. ...
In this article, we will go over how we can self-host our instance of Atuin. A tool we can use to sync our shell history across multiple devices. In the previous article, I showed how you can use the official server. However you may want to run your self-hosted one, so no one can access even the encrypted version of your shell history. We will deploy our instance to fly.io. Why fly. ...
Atuin is a great tool I recently discovered that can be used to sync our shell history across multiple machines. We can either self-host this or use the “officially” hosted one. In a future article, I will show you how you can self-host your version of Atuin on fly.io. But for this article, I will assume you have a server setup. Your history is end-to-end encrypted so the official server is safe to use and store your history on. ...
TIL: How to Setup Neovim for Nixlang I have been recently using NixOS/home-manager and I have been writing a lot of nixlang. To have my system state declaratively set up. I have been doing most of this editing in neovim. It took me a bit of time to work out how to get it set up so there is some basic LSP support and auto-formatting. I created a file called nix. ...
TIL: How to Fix VIA Permission Issues on Linux Recently I have been trying to configure my newish Keychron keyboard using VIA. To add a key to be able to take print screens, making use of the layers provided, as my Keychron Q1 PRO doesn’t have a dedicated print key 😓. However, when I opened the app or the website, I would get the following error. If we go to chrome://device-log you should be able to see something like this: Failed to open '/dev/hidraw9': FILE_ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED. ...
In this blog post, I will show you how you can easily setup Neotest to make testing easier in neovim and DAP to make debugging your tests is a lot easier. I am using the LazyVim neovim distribution, where these two come as easily installed extra plugins. However, it should be easy enough for you to copy the config over to your neovim lua config. LazyVim even has the config available on its website, you don’t even need to deep dive into the code 😄. ...
TIL: How to get Kanshi to work on NixOS and Hyprland I have been using Kanshi to setup my monitor setups automagically depending on which monitors are plugged i.e. if my laptop is docked or not. If it is docked I want my laptop display to be off, when not docked I want it to be on. So my kanshi config file ~/.config/kanshi/config to look something like: I use the name of my monitors as the ports they are plugged into my vary. ...
Introduction Dev Machine My main machine for development at the moment is a 12th Generation Intel Framework Laptop. This series has been inspired by Dev Workflow Intro by Josh Medeski. In this series of posts, I will go over how I have set up my developer workflow and explain why I have made certain decisions and why I use certain tools. This series aim to make it less daunting for you to start your journey on improving your developer workflow. ...
This series has been inspired by Dev Workflow Intro by Josh Medeski. This is sort of a precursor to my series about how I have set up my development workflow. Hopefully, you will be able to pick a few tips and tricks you can add to your development workflow to make it more efficient. Or even give me tips on how I can make my workflow more efficient. In this post we will go over arguably the least important, but at the same time quite important, part of our workflow. ...
My latest iteration of my dotfiles, where I am now using a Laptop as my main development machine (Framework). I’m also using Hyprland as my window manager. Most importantly using NixOS and home-manager to declaratively define the state of my machine i.e. what packages to install, dotfiles. CURRENTLY A WIP 🏠 My dotfiles repo, setup using nixos/home-manager Install 🔥 I wouldn’t recommend just blinding using my dotfiles. They are setup for my specific use-case. ...
Recently I’ve been trying to work out how to update packages that I define declaratively in my Nix config. I think I figured out how to do it using my Nix flake. By running nix flake update and then sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/dotfiles#framework to update the packages. However, I have some plugins say for tmux which are defined like so: t-smart-manager = pkgs.tmuxPlugins.mkTmuxPlugin { pluginName = "t-smart-tmux-session-manager"; version = "unstable-2023-06-05"; rtpFilePath = "t-smart-tmux-session-manager. ...
Introduction In this post I will show you how you can setup tmux (plugins) using the nix package manager, specifically using home-manager. I will also show you how you can avoid an issue I encountered where tmux resurrect wasn’t working properly due to plugin ordering. Typically we use the tmux plugin manager to manage our tmux plugins. However, when I moved to NixOS, I wanted to move away from having lots of different ways of managing what is on my system. ...
Recently I decided to move from Arch Linux to NixOS. Rather than doing what I should’ve done which was try to use NixOS in a VM first and learn Nix properly. I decided to jump into the deep end and completely delete my current Arch Linux build with Nix. This included replacing my dotfiles setup using DotBot moving them to Nix flakes and home-manager (more on this in a bit). In this post, I’ll go over why I moved over to NixOS, and why I am staying put for now. ...
TIL: How to use NUR with Home-Manager & Nix Flakes NUR is the Nix user repository like the Arch user repository (AUR). It exists so that: The NUR was created to share new packages from the community in a faster and more decentralized way. - https://github.com/nix-community/NUR If we want to install packages from NUR in our home manager config which is set up using Nix Flakes. Assuming you build your home manager like ...
TIL: How to Declaratively Setup Mullvad VPN with NixOS I have recently moved to NixOS, one of the great features of NixOS is that you can set up your entire machine from a single git repo. We can do this declaratively, what we mean by this is we tell nix what we want the state to be and nixos will work out how to get there. For example, we can install Mullvad set various options already. ...
TIL: How to Add Vim Navigation FZF FZF is an amazing fuzzy finder tool, that is super flexible and you can create some cool cli one-liners with it. For example, I use it with the fish shell plugin to search through my command history (CTRL + R). In this post, I will show you how vim style navigation to the FZF pop-up preview. All we need to do is add the following to the relevant file i. ...