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Comment by wredue | Hacker News Reader

I just gave nix a go and so far it seems great.

But do you know, if they’re a nicer options finder? The one I found where you just search all several thousand options kinda sucks. I want to just see my package (say, ssh) and just the ssh options, but the results get littered with irrelevancy.

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When I roughly know what I'm doing I use search.nixos.org; if you give it the full services.foo prefix it's usually relevant enough, e.g. for ssh you'd want "services.openssh", which you can find skimming through the results of just searching 'ssh' first:

https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=unstable&from=0&siz...

For anything I'm not 100% sure will be obvious I search through a local clone of the nixpkgs repo directly, but I'll be honest and say I just never took time to search for a better tool

> if they’re a nicer options finder?

https://mynixos.com/

> I want to just see my package (say, ssh) and just the ssh options

https://mynixos.com/nixpkgs/options/programs.ssh

I would suggest using man and searching like any piece of documentation. Specifically you are looking for `man configuration.nix`

That's actually worse search experience and slower because less is struggling with the amount of lines.

https://mynixos.com/

My main usage of Nix is on non-NixOS machines, and I use Home Manager, and while it has a similar problem, just searching the options in the packages it provides configuration for is a smaller issue.

Not sure if this helps you at all or not, it really depends on your usage of Nix, but for managing user configuration I do recommend Home Manager.

I found this a few weeks ago: https://github.com/mlvzk/manix

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