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Comment by actinium226

7 hours ago

> apt-get/pacman/dnf/brew install <everything that you need>

If only it were so simple. Not every tool comes from a package with the same name, (delta is git-delta, "z" is zoxide, which I'm not sure I'd remember off the top of my head when installing on a new system). On top of that, you might not like the defaults of every tool, so you'll have config files that you need to copy over or recreate (and hopefully sync between the computers where you use these tools).

That said I do think nix provides some good solutions for this. It gives you a nice clean way to list the packages you want in a nixfile and also to set their defaults and/or provide some configuration files. It does still require some maintenance (and I choose to install the config files as editable, which is not very nix-y, but I'd rather edit it and then commit the changes to my configs repo for future deploys than to have to edit and redeploy for every minor or exploratory change), but I've found it's much better than trying maintain some sort of `apt-get install [packages]` script.

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actinium226

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shepherdjerred  4 hours ago

Chezmoi makes this really easy: https://www.chezmoi.io/

  • actinium226  4 hours ago

    I only skimmed through the website, but it looks like it only does dotfiles. So I'd need to maintain a separate script to keep my packages in sync. And a script with install commands wouldn't be enough - maybe I decided to stop using abcxyz, I'd like for the script to remove it. Versioning between the package and the dotfile can also sometimes be an issue.