I really don't understand why should I use this over plain nix, can you elaborate?
I understand that if you don't know anything about the language or what is a flake, it may be a little bit difficult.
But really, adding a new package to your environment once you have a flake setup, which a minimal one is trivial, is just adding the name of the package.
Here you have a flake.nix example from leptos. https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos/blob/main/flake.nix
You want a new dependency? Add it to buildInputs. (this one doesn't have packages setup, but anything in the attribute set packages will be available in path)
You want to search a package: https://search.nixos.org/packages (or use the cli)
you want to test a package before adding it? nix-shell -p or nix shell for example.
Heck, even if you want it more easy, you could write a tool in less than 100 lines that adds packages names to .json/.yaml/.toml, which allows you to parse it using the nix language and a simple cli written with bash functions to add/remove packages if you wanted.
That's why it is hard for me to understand this project as a product, it seems like a wrapper to the most basic things :\
After a few months, I needed to do that again, but now the project supported devenv.sh. It took me 5 min.
That experience also repeated for other kinds of tasks, for example: start postgres (or redis or elasticsearch or cassandra...), install packages only if the host system is `darwin`, install old versions of packages that aren't on the registry anymore, etc...
I'm not really against tools that make it easier to use nix, I think devenv is a nice tool and I like that it doesn't hide nix, the same way I love home-manager and use it all the time.
Yep. That's my main argument for it against devbox.
> Does it have any kind of simpler syntax for overlays?
Yes, it does. But what helps isn't that, but the concise docs with just the information I need to know to get up and running quickly: https://devenv.sh/getting-started/
I've read multiple docs/books on Nix, but I always find myself lost when I need to accomplish anything simple. With devenv, I can spot most of my answers from the docs menu. They are all a single click distant from me.
I also tried passing arguments to specify the GCC version in like 10 different ways, *that all failed silently*. Staying far far far away from Nix even though on paper I should love it.
Edit: oh yeah and `nix shell` and `nix-shell` both exist and don't do the same thing
However, Nix poses a relatively steep learning curve being built up from first principles making it very general. Flox aims at simplifying this by narrowing the problem field and providing specialized abstractions and interfaces for those who want to benefit from nix' capabilities without needing to becoming a nix expert at day 0.
(flox employee)