Hacker News Reader

I’ve setup nix home-manager such that, if I clone my dotfiles repository and setup home.nix (link it into place and make any machine-specific edits necessary), then home-manager will install a predictable version of vim, clone my plugin manager into the right place and symlink my vimrc into the right place. Then, on first launch, all my plugins install themselves and I’m ready to go.

View on HN

The problem is that whenever you want to do a quick tweak, you have to do a `home-manager switch`, which can take a good 15 seconds or so. It's not the end of the world, but it's a very annoying bit of friction. It's particularly painful if you're trying to quickly test out changes that you're not confident of and iterate. This is compounded by the fact that home-manager currently doesn't work properly with the new flake based profiles (https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/2848).

Yeah, I don’t have home-manager generate configurations for vim. I have home-manager generate a symlink to my version-controlled vimrc. This way I get the quick setup benefits of home-manager without the slow reload times.

Incidentally, I just polished my script for working around that issue: https://github.com/fiddlerwoaroof/dotfiles/blob/master/scrip...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com