How to Learn Nix
Oh hi! Author here. Fun thing to wake up to.<p>I wanted to point something out that the series doesn&#x27;t do a good job of highlighting:<p><i>You can use Nix alongside your existing package manager.</i><p>They won&#x27;t conflict. You can set up dev environments with Nix without drinking the kool-aid. I still have Homebrew installed, and I still occasionally reach for it in the rare cases where Nix is missing some package I want to try. But I am sad every time I do: I never really realized how <i>unbelievably slow</i> Homebrew is until I tried Nix.<p>So if you&#x27;re Nix-curious, you can try it out without committing to anything upfront. I didn&#x27;t make the switch until part 19:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ianthehenry.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;how-to-learn-nix&#x2F;switching-from-homebrew-to-nix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ianthehenry.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;how-to-learn-nix&#x2F;switching-fro...</a><p>Nix is weird and hard to learn, but it&#x27;s a lot like git in that respect. Yes, the UI is terrible. You have to learn the difference between `reset --hard` and `reset --mixed` and it&#x27;s weird and unintuitive but you eventually get over it.<p>And people are using it <i>despite</i> how unintuitive it is, because of how valuable it is to them. No one is arguing that `nix-env -qaP package` is a reasonable command to ask a fellow human being to type, but people are willing to type it anyway because the benefits are worth it. As a fun example, a few weeks ago I wrote up a little hack that I would not have even attempted before spending the time to learn Nix:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ianthehenry.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;janet-game&#x2F;how-to-patch-emacs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ianthehenry.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;janet-game&#x2F;how-to-patch-emacs&#x2F;</a>