Dotfiles

An opinionated flake-based system configuration for both NixOS¹ and macOS (via nix-darwin).

If you have no idea what any of that means, I highly recommend checking out Matthias's excellent YouTube mini-course.

Structure

Home vs NixOS/Darwin modules

This repo doesn't follow the usual /home, /nixos, /darwin structure. Instead, modules are organized by feature under /modules, and each module can mix system (nixos/nix-darwin) and home-manager configuration e.g.

modules
├── config
│   ├── ...
│   └── <module-a>.nix         # cross-platform module
├── programs
│   ├── <module-b>             # module with platform-specific implementations
│   │   ├── _darwin.nix        # → nix-darwin module
│   │   ├── _nixos.nix         # → nixos module
│   │   └── _home.nix          # → home-manager module
│   ├── ...
│   └── <module-c>.nix         # another cross-platform module
└── ...

How does it work?

• **/*/_home.nix files are automatically imported as home-manager.sharedModules in modules/shared.nix.
• **/*/_nixos.nix files are automatically imported in modules/nixos.nix.
• **/*/_darwin.nix files are automatically imported in modules/darwin.nix.
• Wherever an upstream home-manager module exists, it's preferred over a hand-rolled NixOS/nix-darwin one. System-level files (_darwin.nix/_nixos.nix) are mainly for what home-manager can't do itself: GUI app installs, homebrew casks, system defaults, and the like.
• Custom options with no upstream equivalent are declared directly under programs.* (inside _home.nix) so they read/write the same way as real home-manager options — see Aliases.

A practical example of a module that defines _nixos.nix, _darwin.nix, and _home.nix together is the 1Password module in modules/programs/1password.

Presets

Presets are flags that group related programs. For example, enabling my.presets.devOps.enable activates Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and others by default.

# Enable DevOps tools e.g. Docker, Terraform ..etc
my.presets.devOps.enable = true;

# Exclude Terraform
my.programs.terraform.enable = false;

Available presets can be found in modules/presets.nix.

Aliases

For convenience, I use the following option aliases:

• home → home-manager.users.<username>.home
  • e.g., home.file
• xdg → home-manager.users.<username>.xdg
  • e.g., xdg.configFile
• my.user → users.users.<username>
  • e.g., my.user.extraGroups
• my.programs → home-manager.users.<username>.programs
  • e.g., my.programs.terraform.enable

The <username> refers to the primary user login, configured in modules/config/users.

📚 Credits

• Henrik's dotfiles
• Matthias's nixos-config

🧑‍⚖️ License

MIT © z0al

Footnotes

1. This repo used to be heavily focused on NixOS, but life happens and I'm currently stuck on macOS 😔. While most NixOS-specific configurations have been removed, the repo is still NixOS-ready and waiting for the day I switch back soon ™️ (looking at you, Asahi Linux 👀). ↩