Welcome to my home manager configuration! I hold some strong stances regarding nix and how and where things belong, which means I do a couple of funky things in my configs.

It boils down to the mantra that every user should be able to modify and build their config independently of other users[^1], which has some interesting consequences:

• it necessitates the standalone usage of home manager
• it prevents the usage of display managers
• it complicates the usage of desktop environments
• it imposes a strong separation of system and user settings (which is a good thing!)
• patching the host's nix package to allow local registry resolution[^2]

Even if you don't care about this stuff, here are a couple of interesting things I do that might be of interest:

• setting up home-manager specialisations (specialisation.nix)
• DE/WM specific specialisations (check their corresponding modules as well)
• tofi scripts for (they are exposed in a flake, you can try them out with tomething like nix run --no-write-lock-file "github:mrtipson/home.nix?dir=packages#tofi-nix-run"):
  • quickly launching applications from nixpkgs (tofi-nix-run.nix)
  • recursively picking a file (tofi-recursive-file.nix)

I've recently switched from flakes to npins, but I wanted to keep the flake output structure. I don't know if there is a better way, but I ended up patching home-manager to do what I want. Then all you need is to bootstrap so home-manager starts using the patched version: home-manager switch -f ... -A ... -I home-manager=$(nix-instantiate --eval --raw -A patchedHM), and setup home manager so it manages itself:

programs.home-manager = {
    enable = true;
    path = lib.mkForce (import ./. { inherit sources; }).patchedHM;
};

[^1] This doesn't mean that it doesn't affect you if you have only a single user. For me it helps with choosing the correct abstraction if I think about making it user agnostic.

[^2] Because some people hate fun, they broke local registry evaluation for flake inputs, which is why I now patch nix on the host system (see registry.nix).