Congrats on the launch!

I love Nix. I really do. I also recognize the onboarding experience is bad at best and terrible at worst.

As such I welcome any effort to make it more approachable. I believe the imperative CLI is a great step in that direction. It's much closer to what many people expect and will feel comfortable with. Simplifying the "using an environment from somewhere else" story is also one I strongly relate to.

One thing I'm not seeing that I think would be important is IDE integration. Starting your IDE from the command line inside the environment is not intuitive to many of my colleagues and is something I've diagnodes as the root cause of an issue more than once.

What's your story for dropping down into 'real Nix' if required? I'm a bit afraid that this might drop you off at a cliff for somewhat more complicated environments, for example to set up a cross-compilation Rust toolchain.

To stick with the example of Rust development, I have the following shellHook in one of my Flakes:

    export LIBCLANG_PATH="${pkgs.llvmPackages.libclang.lib}/lib"
    export RUST_SRC_PATH="${pkgs.rust.packages.stable.rustPlatform.rustLibSrc}"
    export BINDGEN_EXTRA_CLANG_ARGS="$(< ${stdenv.cc}/nix-support/libc-crt1-cflags) \
        $(< ${stdenv.cc}/nix-support/libc-cflags) \
        $(< ${stdenv.cc}/nix-support/cc-cflags) \
        $(< ${stdenv.cc}/nix-support/libcxx-cxxflags) \
        ${lib.optionalString stdenv.cc.isClang "-idirafter ${stdenv.cc.cc.lib}/lib/clang/${lib.getVersion stdenv.cc.cc}/include"} \
        ${lib.optionalString stdenv.cc.isGNU "-isystem ${lib.getDev stdenv.cc.cc}/include/c++/${lib.getVersion stdenv.cc.cc} -isystem ${stdenv.cc.cc}/include/c++/${lib.getVersion stdenv.cc.cc}/${stdenv.hostPlatform.config} -isystem ${stdenv.cc.cc}/lib/gcc/${stdenv.hostPlatform.config}/${lib.getVersion stdenv.cc.cc}/include"} \
        $NIX_CFLAGS_COMPILE"

It was necessary to get Rust-Analyzer to play nice. How would I ever set something like this up in Flox? Is this kind of setup something you want to abstract away? If not, how would this ever be discoverable to a user that isn't familiar with Nix?

Please don't mistake these questions as me saying this can never work. I really want it to work, I just don't know how yet.