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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what nix is doing for you? There's vim, absolutely, coreutils (though I don't immediately see anything GNU-specific), and a tiny wrapper script that happens to be written in flake.nix but could trivially be factored out. I don't see anything that I wouldn't expect to run on, say, OpenBSD if you installed vim.

(That said, yes, it's a nice journaling system)

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This is a pretty poor example for a few reasons, but the idea is that anyone get can a shell with the tool fully installed along with all its dependencies, with a single command:

nix shell 'git+https://tangled.sh/@oppi.li/journal'

It's massive overkill for a shell alias, but for a more complex project it can be very nice.

One area that is especially a massive win is projects that cross multiple ecosystems. So like, C++ project with some Python bindings and a Typescript frontend? Setting up that dev environment is often a nightmare but Nix makes it trivial and highly reproducible.

Sure; I'm typing this comment on a NixOS machine in a browser controlled from a flake I wrote myself - I get using nix and flakes in general. It's just that this particular case seems like such overkill that it actually seems like a weird tradeoff even if you're used to flakes.

Yea I don't see Nix doing much here particularly, but for me I typically would do something like this to make the system as consistent as possible over a long period of time without being actively maintained.

I guess this does ensure the key `journal` command works exactly the same because the dateutils binary will stay locked to the version in the `flake.lock`.

I would have assumed that nvim would also be locked because that's where I would expect more possible breaking changes with the existing special config.

With little tools/projects like these I could easily see months-years before it would get any active attention from me again (or simply I wouldn't be using it; so it doesn't matter).

Bring back blosxom: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blosxom

Oh wow, I had completely forgotten about Blosxom!

I take it from your post that it is no more?

I was somewhat expecting that the flake would include nvim bundled with the vimrc in the folder.

You could then just open nvim in the `nix develop` environment (or even use something like direnv to activate it when you cd in) and have a minimal journaling environment

Yeah, if it included ex. nvim plugins then it would make more sense to me. It's just this particular combination is for installing tools that I struggle to imagine aren't default-installed everywhere, and version-locking some of the most stable programs I've ever used (though I guess neovim might make breaking changes?). Honestly it strikes me as most useful as a 'hello world 2.0' flake demo.

Bundling a little script into your path like that is pretty cool, just overkill to use a flake + nix for _just_ that

author seems to be the type to follow tech trends and use them to signal "coolness" - people like that use these absurd stacks because its niche, not for any actual benefit

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