Launching today
Nixmac
Nix-darwin that speaks plain English
106 followers
Nix-darwin that speaks plain English
106 followers
nixmac turns your Mac into a reproducible, version-controlled system. Describe what you want in plain English — it writes the Nix, builds it, and applies it safely.
Nixmac
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@cooper_maruyama Congrats on launching Nixmac — nix-darwin that speaks plain English lowers the bar for a lot of people who bounced off Nix. We made you a free launch video for it (below), yours to download and re-use anywhere, no strings, and it is whitelabel. You can add it to your launch page in here; launches with video tend to do better than those without.
We built it with FoxPlug: paste your site and it turns what you just shipped into a launch video, images, GIFs and posts in about 30 seconds. This one is on us — make your own free at https://foxplug.com
Foyer
The hard part of nix-darwin isn't writing the initial config, it's understanding why a rebuild failed three weeks later when you've forgotten what you changed and the error message is a wall of Nix evaluation trace. Curious whether Nixmac helps with that debugging side, or whether it's mostly focused on the generation step. Also wondering how it handles the gap between what someone asks for in plain English and what's actually available in nixpkgs or the darwin module set, since a lot of the friction in practice comes from options that exist in theory but have subtle constraints you only discover by reading the source.
Nixmac
@fberrez1 We do things like bundling the nixos options doc and even a custom tool that's specifically for parsing the nixos options. Nix also just happens to be very LLM-friendly, which is why it's able to one-shot even quite complex prompts, whereas if an LLM was asked to do the same thing by driving a computer and a terminal, it may fail and/or use a lot more tokens.
Also, Nix is unique in that you can `nix eval` or `nix build` and sort of get an idea if the proposed change will be successful - we do that in the background to increase the probability that the proposed change will work.
The plain-English → generated Nix → safe-apply loop is the right shape for the people Nix usually scares off, but the safety hinges on what I can see before it runs. Does it show the generated Nix diff for review before applying, and is each apply a rollbackable nix-darwin generation I can revert if a vague request compiles to the wrong thing? Curious how it handles an ambiguous request — ask to clarify, or guess and let me roll back?
Nixmac
@hi_i_am_mimo Of course! I'm a heavy nix user myself, and one of the "not-optional" constraints we give ourselves is that it should never feel like it "gets in the way" to Nix natives.
I run a laptop plus a Mac mini I use for local model work, and config drift between the two is exactly the kind of thing Nix is supposed to solve but plain-English descriptions make me wonder about. If I describe a setup in English on one machine, is the generated config meant to be portable to a second machine as-is, or does Nixmac bake in host-specific assumptions (hardware, installed apps) that I'd need to redo per machine? Basically: is the "plain English" step a one-time per-machine thing, or does it produce something closer to a shared base config with per-host overrides layered on top?
Nixmac
@galdayan the configuration will normally be portable for the most part. for many of the apps, Nix (and thus nixmac) can take care of the installation itself, so on the new machine you don't have to worry about whether the app is installed, it will install it for you if not present yet. the shared config with per-host tweaks is something that you can achieve with the tool as well; the same repository can contain different configurations, and you can switch between those. you can instruct the code to share code between those configurations, but also have some overrides per machine if you want.
Curious how it handles apps you download outside of Homebrew or the App Store, like random .dmg utilities, can Nixmac pick those up or do you have to manually add them to the config?
Nixmac
@sevilmoolkghgs If it's not on homebrew or supported by home-manager / nix-darwin, in my experience it tends to write a script that gets called on activation that tries to install it. For example, it might find a link to the dmg somewhere. I'd assume this is what most agents would do, so maybe Nixmac is not the ideal tool for something like this
ChatWebby AI
Since nix-darwin setups often need to manage secrets like SSH keys or API tokens, does Nixmac integrate with something like agenix or sops-nix, or is that left entirely up to the user?
Nixmac
@zain_sheikh so far it's up to the user, but it's something that is in our backlog. @cooper_maruyama spends a lot of time thinking about secrets and has IMHO very good takes on them.
nix-darwin is one of those things i keep hearing is worth it but never actually get around to learning because the config syntax scares me off every time. this is the first "plain english to nix" pitch that's made me want to actually try it instead of just bookmarking it. since it applies changes for you, does it keep the old generation easily reachable if a plain english request builds something you didn't actually want, or do you have to know nix well enough to roll back yourself
Nixmac
@omri_ben_shoham1 rolling back is directly integrated in the UI :) And tracking of all your changes via Git so you never lose anything.