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Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

tangled.sh

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Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#11
post #6

what is this nix religion I keep hearing about

Nix is a form of computing that's simultaneously 20 years in the past and 20 years in the future. I love it. Honest answer though, it's a deterministic way of building up a computer/environment. Think pip/uv/packages.lock but for everything.

open to the select few who are able to ignore what the official documentation says and spend some on the (admittedly friendly) irc channel to learn how it REALLY works.

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#12

here I am tangenting into wtf tangled.sh is, maybe that's the entire point of this submission.

I've seen it quite a bit on BlueSky with some devs I follow. It's a social git host built on-top of ATProto (The underlying tech of BlueSky): https://blog.tangled.sh/intro

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#13
post #5

I don't see what nix is doing for you? There's vim, absolutely, coreutils (though I don't immediately see anything GNU-specific), and a tiny wrapper script that happens to be written in flake.nix but could trivially be factored out. I don't see anything that I wouldn't expect to run on, say, OpenBSD if you installed vim. (That said, yes, it's a nice journaling system)

This is a pretty poor example for a few reasons, but the idea is that anyone get can a shell with the tool fully installed along with all its dependencies, with a single command: nix shell 'git+ https://tangled.sh/@oppi.li/journal ' It's massive overkill for a shell alias, but for a more complex project it can be very nice.

One area that is especially a massive win is projects that cross multiple ecosystems. So like, C++ project with some Python bindings and a Typescript frontend? Setting up that dev environment is often a nightmare but Nix makes it trivial and highly reproducible.

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#14
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix is a form of computing that's simultaneously 20 years in the past and 20 years in the future. I love it. Honest answer though, it's a deterministic way of building up a computer/environment. Think pip/uv/packages.lock but for everything.

open to the select few who are able to ignore what the official documentation says and spend some on the (admittedly friendly) irc channel to learn how it REALLY works.

I've only dabbled, but what have you learned in the irc that isn't in the docs?

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#15
post #14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

open to the select few who are able to ignore what the official documentation says and spend some on the (admittedly friendly) irc channel to learn how it REALLY works.

I've only dabbled, but what have you learned in the irc that isn't in the docs?

Haven't tried in a while and haven't checked the documentation now but back then the method for installing packages in the docs was commented on like "yeah you're not supposed to do that". Features were in a perpetual "experimental" but not really state.

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#16

Nix always felt like an OS on the blockchain. It's fine if you value verifiability above everything, but becomes very burdensome if you find yourself tweaking your dev environment often. Still, I think it probably teaches good discipline.

I’ve made the compromise of using nix package manager on a normal Linux distro. Gives most of the features I care about, with basically no downsides.

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#17

I don't see what nix is doing for you? There's vim, absolutely, coreutils (though I don't immediately see anything GNU-specific), and a tiny wrapper script that happens to be written in flake.nix but could trivially be factored out. I don't see anything that I wouldn't expect to run on, say, OpenBSD if you installed vim. (That said, yes, it's a nice journaling system)

I was somewhat expecting that the flake would include nvim bundled with the vimrc in the folder.

You could then just open nvim in the `nix develop` environment (or even use something like direnv to activate it when you cd in) and have a minimal journaling environment

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#18

Nix always felt like an OS on the blockchain. It's fine if you value verifiability above everything, but becomes very burdensome if you find yourself tweaking your dev environment often. Still, I think it probably teaches good discipline.

I’ve made the compromise of using nix package manager on a normal Linux distro. Gives most of the features I care about, with basically no downsides.

Nix + Home Manager is a good combo if you don’t want to go the whole way. But yes, I would recommend starting with just Nix.

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#19
If you want week numbers in the calendar, you can use `ncal -w` and they'll be the last row. Add a `-3` and you get:

    $ ncal -w3
        July 2025         August 2025       September 2025
    Mo     7 14 21 28        4 11 18 25     1  8 15 22 29
    Tu  1  8 15 22 29        5 12 19 26     2  9 16 23 30
    We  2  9 16 23 30        6 13 20 27     3 10 17 24
    Th  3 10 17 24 31        7 14 21 28     4 11 18 25
    Fr  4 11 18 25        1  8 15 22 29     5 12 19 26
    Sa  5 12 19 26        2  9 16 23 30     6 13 20 27
    Su  6 13 20 27        3 10 17 24 31     7 14 21 28
       27 28 29 30 31    31 32 33 34 35    36 37 38 39 40

Re: Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils

#20

here I am tangenting into wtf tangled.sh is, maybe that's the entire point of this submission.

Yeah, this is a good blog article and a great pitch for this service. There was a discussion yesterday about where to look for the next github...
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