Yeah, the hard part is maintaining a file just to have the tools you want is a major hurdle that is not reasonable for most people to jump over. If I'm working I might do something like this:

    curl example.com/data.json | jq ...

and I'll realize I don't have `jq` installed. I do not want to open vim, edit a configuration file, and then re-run a command to rebuild my system. I just want jq. I can't change context like that just to get a package.

I understand this isn't aligned with the purity stance that nix has but if they were able to allow this use case, it would most likely get more people doing it the right way eventually.

I can't drink all the kool-aid at once, I really need to replace bits of my workflow at a time and I can't do that with nix currently.

The approach I've laid out in my original comment (using `nix-env`) provides a bad developer experience and makes me not able(willing?) to move forward with the adopting more of the practices. If the initial experience was better, I'd invest more time learning more.