The premise of this tool is problematic. At the very least, the assumptions that are made regarding where your code is and what it looks like must be documented in the readme.

I haven't tested this, but if you're piping home-manager's std{out,err} to pipes just to print them as is afterwards, then you don't need pipes at all. POSIX processes inherit their parent's std{in,out,err} so the spawned home-manager should just print to the same output than your program

After #14, we no longer print out an error message when run_home_manager_switch returns an error. This is good for the case where home-manager switch runs and fails (as home-manager prints an error), but for other cases, we have less information.

Example: home-manager not in PATH

We should print out an error message for these cases.

hdn currently outputs an error when hm returns an error.

This may be confusing for users, as they might think this is two separate errors. Consider only showing an error when home.nix could not be rolled back.

Here is an example of when HM fails:

[fisher@workshop hdn]$ ./target/debug/hdn add jafefabghsa 
Using /Users/fisher/.config/home-manager/home.nix as home.nix
Adding ["jafefabghsa"] to home.nix
Running home-manager switch: PID 99134
error: undefined variable 'jafefabghsa'

       at /nix/store/grz4jrp7ykdn7jqwnjkmwzdmpbz5xxl1-source/home.nix:68:5:

           67|     pkgs.vhs
           68|     jafefabghsa
             |     ^
           69| ];
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
Running home-manager switch resulted in an error, reverting home.nix

Since we are showing HM output directly, we output to the user (use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information); however, this is a HM flag that hdn doesn't support.

Support this flag to make things nicer for the user.

We rely on nix-editor's functions to parse and edit home.nix, but since those functions aren't documented and nix-editor isn't at a stable release, they could change.

Furthermore, nix-editor depends on several crates to provide its CLI. To reduce distribution size, my current approach is to use those same crates, but ideally we shouldn't have to pull those crates in for just the parsing and editing functionality.

Bug

If I have the following valid Nix config:

  home.packages =   builtins.attrValues {
      inherit (pkgs)
         gnome-2048
         ;
      };

hdn can't figure out how to read the package list.

$ hdn remove gnome-2048
error: could not update home.packages attribute in home.nix
caused by: could not read values of home.packages attribute in home.nix
caused by: Error with array

Suggested Fixes

Either or both of:

1. Ensure these sorts of expressions can be read
2. Handle a # hdn anchor override that I can put into my file to denote where hdn can pretend a [ list ] begins, ignoring surrounding syntax

Context

The impl might be a bit involved on this one, but I'm doing it for a reason (it's not academic). I do the following, basically:

  home.packages = [
        pkgs.python310Packages.autopep8
      ] ++ builtins.attrValues {
      inherit (pkgs)
          # many
          # Many
          # MANY
          # pkgs.packages ;-) 
          ;
      };

That allows me to not have to put pkgs on everything, yet still also use the python310Packages.autopep8 which does not work if I just bake it in the list.

error: syntax error, unexpected '.'

       at /home/bujiraso/.config/home-manager/home.nix:181:28:

          181|           python310Packages.autopep8
             |                            ^
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)

Perhaps a bug is required for home-manager, too, on that one, but I haven't gotten around to it.

When I run a simple command, it fails

bash $ hdn remove gnome-2048
home.nix doesn't contain any of the specified packages, home-manager switch was not run

Here's my home.packages:

bash $ grep -m 1 home.pack home.nix 
  home.packages = [ pkgs.gnome-2048 ];

If I modify to

home.packages = with pkgs; [ gnome-2048 ];

It works. I also notice the add command does not check if pkgs is necessary, in the other direction, leading to errors on install.

A nix flake can be installed with e.g. nix profile install github:peterldowns/nix-search-cli.

hdn should support installing a flake with a similar syntax: hdn add github:peterldowns/nix-search-cli.