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Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

> Nix needs a new porcelain interface for it's CLIs.

It already has one with the 'nix' command, it just needs to be manually enabled under 'experimental-features', but once done there is basically no reason to ever touch any of the old commands.

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Yup. I started with Nix a little over a year ago on Nix 2.3, and have only ever used flakes and the new CLI. It's complete from my point of view— the main issue is just that the pills and all the official documentation still refer to the old commands.

I wish they'd flip it over to being the default and update the docs. I know that's not trivial, and it's hard when all the long-time community members have the legacy commands in their muscle memory, but IMO the current state of affairs is actively hurting the onboard experience.

I started with a single system on NixOS around February of this year. I just recently saw an example of `nix search` instead of `nix-env -qaP`. I haven't seen any documentation for all of this new stuff. Any place to go, or do we just have to go read the source code?

`nix --help`, `nix search --help`, ... will show a man page, but a look at source can't hurt, as there are a couple of rough corners with the `nix` command that can be rather confusing.

For example `nix profile remove REGEX` will only match against the attribute part of the URL, which for Flakes is often just "defaultPackage.x86_64-linux", completely missing the name of the actual package, thus making it impossible to remove packages by name (using the index number will work).

The source is pretty readable:

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/tree/master/src/nix

I think it's basically just the man pages online, but I've found this resource to be pretty helpful:

https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix....

> it just needs to be manually enabled under 'experimental-features'

Same with flakes. My impression is that Nix is either on the cusp of a major paradigm and usability change, or the status quo will be forever in a state of having "wrong defaults."

> My impression is that Nix is either on the cusp of a major paradigm and usability change, or the status quo will be forever in a state of having "wrong defaults."

I think probably both. The Nix community is host to very diverse and partially overlapping experimentation, and features like rollbacks and version pinning make the bleeding edge feel relatively safe, further fostering such experimentation.

The new Nix CLI will be huge for new users and for adoption once it's finalized. But there will probably always be a bunch of Nix users doing weird, cool shit that everyone kinda wishes was 'here already' for mainstream use.

FWIW, I'd say the new Nix CLI should see broader adoption soon. It was only just around the beginning of 2022 that they started signaling it was mature and there's been good progress to improve things like Home Manager compatibility with the new session format brought with the new CLI since.

I think mostly now a few people just need to step up to overhaul the docs.

I agree that critical mass with third-party Nix code, especially in important projects like Home Manager and Nix-Darwin, is crucial and it's almost there.

I don't want to rush the finalization of flakes or the new CLI, though, eager as I am to see them come out from behind the 'experimental' flag. There's clearly still a lot of work, including bugfixes, going into the flakes implementation.

I think the really crazy default is that flakes by default will not include git submodules, you need to pass a special flag to enable it, which is undocumented and have to dig through github issues: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/4423

Which is not without its own warts, in ways that just don't give me any hope. Simplest example:

nix run nixpkgs#cargo --help

gives you a pager viewing the manpage of `nix run`.

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