dotfiles

Reproducible dev environment managed with Nix + home-manager: shell (zsh + starship), git/gh, fzf, and config for WezTerm and Neovim (lazy.nvim, snacks.nvim, oil.nvim, neogit, gitsigns, which-key).

No system-level manager (nix-darwin/NixOS) is used here — everything lives in the user's home directory, so this works the same way on a fresh macOS or Linux machine.

Structure

• flake.nix / flake.lock — pins the exact package versions (nixpkgs + home-manager) so a rebuild years from now installs the same thing it did today.
• home.nix — the actual config: packages, zsh, starship, git, gh, fzf, and the symlinks that wire wezterm/ and nvim/ into ~/.config.
• wezterm/, nvim/ — plain config files for those two apps, edited in place (see below).
• bootstrap.sh — one-time setup on a new machine.
• rebuild.sh — re-run any time home.nix changes.

Using this on a brand new machine

Works unmodified on both macOS (Apple Silicon or Intel) and Linux — the flake detects the current system and username at switch time (via --impure, see below), so there's nothing to edit first. Clone the repo anywhere you like and run the bootstrap script:

git clone git@github.com:AlienClubrider/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles
./bootstrap.sh

bootstrap.sh will:

1. Install Nix (via the Determinate Systems installer) if it isn't already present.
2. Symlink the repo to ~/.dotfiles — a stable path that home.nix uses to find wezterm/ and nvim/, regardless of where you actually cloned the repo.
3. Run the first home-manager switch, which installs every package and config declared in home.nix.
4. Make zsh your login shell (this needs your password, since only root can change /etc/shells — everything else runs unprivileged).

Log out and back in (or reboot) afterward so the new login shell takes effect.

If you already have a ~/.zshrc (or other files home-manager wants to manage), move it aside first — e.g. mv ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.bak — since home-manager refuses to overwrite files it doesn't already own.

Why --impure

flake.nix reads the current system (builtins.currentSystem) and user ($USER) at evaluation time instead of hardcoding them, which is what lets the same flake work on any machine unedited. Both are impure by Nix's definition (their value depends on where you run it), so bootstrap.sh and rebuild.sh both pass --impure. Everything else about the config is still fully pinned by flake.lock.

macOS notes

• wezterm runs straight from nixpkgs — no wrapper needed, since it talks to Metal directly instead of needing Linux's EGL/GL stack.
• The nerd font gets symlinked into ~/Library/Fonts automatically on activation, since macOS apps read fonts via CoreText rather than fontconfig.
• Caps Lock -> Escape isn't scripted here (no nix-darwin means home-manager can't touch system keyboard settings). Set it manually once: System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Modifier Keys > set the Caps Lock key to Escape.

Linux notes

• wezterm is wrapped with nixGL (nixGLDefault, which auto-detects Nvidia vs. Mesa at switch time). Nix-built GUI apps can't see a non-NixOS host's GPU drivers on their own, so without this wrapper wezterm fails to open a window with an EGL error.
• Caps Lock is remapped to Escape via an XDG autostart entry that runs setxkbmap -option caps:escape at login. Went with this over the desktop's own keyboard-settings (gsettings/dconf) because Cinnamon's settings daemon didn't actually apply that key to the live X session when tested — setxkbmap in autostart works regardless of which X11 desktop is running. It's additive (-option, not -options), so it layers onto whatever XKB options the system already sets rather than replacing them.

Everyday use

Run myshortcuts any time to print the full list of shell aliases this config sets up (ll, gs, ta, etc.) — it's generated straight from home.nix, so it never drifts out of date.

Making changes later

• Editing home.nix (packages, zsh, starship, git/gh config): after editing, run ./rebuild.sh to apply it.
• Editing wezterm/wezterm.lua or anything under nvim/: these are live-symlinked into ~/.config, so changes take effect immediately — WezTerm hot-reloads its config, and Neovim picks up changes the next time it starts. No rebuild needed.

Commit and push changes the normal way (git add, git commit, git push) to keep GitHub in sync.