Nixmac
Nix-darwin that speaks plain English
233 followers
Nix-darwin that speaks plain English
233 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.
how does it handle apps installed outside of nix, like random cask apps or things from the mac app store, do those get pulled into the config somehow or is it nix only
Nixmac
@halimeisbn we automatically detect brew packages and casks that you have installed without Nix and give you the option in the UI to migrate that into the decalrative nix-darwin configuration. About App Store, as of today there is no way for Nix to interact with it
How does it handle upgrades when Nix itself pushes breaking changes, and do I need to maintain my own backups before each apply?
Nixmac
@nurullahb53193 versioning is managed via Nix flakes, pinning everything, so there is no way Nix will pull the rug under your feet. Nix itself supports rollbacks so if an upgrade goes wrong reverting is trivial
Setting up a new Mac has always been my least favorite afternoon, hunting down settings I only half remember. Cooper, being able to simply say what I want and having a way to redo it later sounds genuinely freeing.
Nixmac
@robin_de_lacroix Indeed. And you can move your configuration to any machine and get it set up straight away.
@arximboldi Amazing !
Tried it on my M2 and was surprised how the natural language description actually translated into clean nix code without me editing anything. The dry-run build before applying was a nice touch for someone who breaks their config weekly.
Nixmac
@downs_jova35899 I just sighed with relief. We've worked really hard on it but as a developer I've found that things find a way of going wrong as soon as you show it to someone lol
The plain-English layer over nix-darwin sounds interesting. Is Nixmac mainly meant for generating an initial macOS config from natural language, or does it also help maintain and edit an existing nix-darwin setup over time? I’m curious how much control it exposes when someone wants to inspect or tweak the generated config directly.
Nixmac
@mia_qiao Over time. I'm a nix native and built it for myself. My personal repo has hundreds of commits!
@cooper_maruyama the part that clicks for me is running nix eval / nix build in the background before applying — you get an actual verify step instead of just hoping the LLM's config is right.
Most "AI writes your config" tools skip exactly that, so it's neat that Nix's declarative model hands you a real dry-run to gate on. Feels like the honest way to do agent reliability on a system you really don't want to break. 👌
Nixmac
@cooper_maruyama @akbar_b thank you! Nix is indeed perfect for agentic workflows precisely because of that
@cooper_maruyama @arximboldi Right — and the piece I'd love to see next: when nix build fails, does the agent read the error and take another swing on its own, or hand it back to you? That eval→repair loop is where "writes your config" becomes "actually keeps it green."
how does it handle macOS updates when Apple ships a new version, does Nix flake generation get out of sync or does it detect and rebuild automatically