Nix-Gui

Make NixOS usable for non-technical users through a settings / package management GUI.

(Work in progress: more features and refinement necessary to meet the above goal)

Motives

The declarative nature of NixOS provides it the capability of being the most user friendly GNU/Linux distribution. No more editing dotfiles, /etc files, manually writing timers, services, running commands to manage and create users and groups, etc. NixOS integrates all of that into a declarative system, and this project integrates NixOS’ declarative system into a GUI.

Serve Users Unfamiliar with or Learning Nix

Nix-Gui is a configuration management tool designed for those who haven’t mastered the (arguably difficult) nix language. It is also an attempt to replicate the ease of use of popular configuration systems including

Unity Control Center (Ubuntu), not used anymore
Cinnamon Settings (Linux Mint)
Synaptic Package Manager

Nix-Gui is designed to gradually and comfortably teach users about the mechanics of the nix language and nixpkgs.

Serve as an Effective System Management Tool for Experienced Users

At the most advanced level, and once feature parity has been achieved. Power users should be capable of changing system configuration, creating system ISOs, deploying systems to the cloud, etc in Nix-Gui more intelligibly and faster than through their traditional means of writing a nix module.

Serve Mobile Users

An additional motive for this project is to enable system configuration for mobile devices without having to type code on your phone.

Functionality

Nix-Gui is a tool which loads data including option paths, option types, default values, configured values, descriptions, etc. The option hierarchy is made explorable and the value of individual options are editable. Changes are committed by writing to modules within the configuration path.

This data is retrieved from <nixos/nixpkgs> and from the configuration path via NIX_PATH nixos-configuration.

Features

View and edit the state of options using type-specific widgets (e.g. textbox for strings)
- View and edit the actual nix expression defining an option
- View metadata of an option including type and definition
Save changes to a relevant module in the configuration path
- “Diff” to show option changes not yet committed to disk
Explore the hierarchy of options
- Utilize color indicators of which options have been set
Search options based on options path, type, and description
Undo changes to options

Major Shortcomings to be Fixed

Currently there are a few major limitations to Nix-Gui, including

Documentation is incomplete.
The interface for ListOf and AttrsOf is incomplete (nix-gui#72) (nix-gui#30).
Nix-Gui has yet to be thoroughly vetted, therefore the configuration path is copied to ~/.config/nixgui/configurations/, in which all changes made by Nix-Gui are saved.
The data structures used in this application aren’t yet optimal, resulting in some configuration paths taking longer than I’d like to load (nix-gui#128).
Some option types aren’t handled yet (e.g. float, package, lambda, and specific types like ncdns.conf configuration type, systemd option). These options can only be edited as a nix expression, as they do not have a matching widget.

Docs

Contributing

Developers and users, if you want to help please

Run the application and submit bug report and feature request issues on GitHub.
Contribute to the UX Survey.
See good first issues.
Create issues to ask questions about code, documentation, etc (there are no dumb questions).
Contribute to important dependencies including rnix-parser and rnix-lsp.
Or contact me on matrix to discuss.

Contact

Contact me on Matrix (andrew:mtx.rew.la)

0x4A6F / nix-gui