dotfiles

My Mac and Linux setup. flake.nix has two parts:

• Mac: nix-darwin (darwin.nix) installs the apps through Homebrew and runs Home Manager.
• Linux (Arch, Ubuntu, Debian): standalone Home Manager.

Both use home.nix, which installs my command-line tools from nixpkgs and links the terminal dotfiles (zsh, bash, git, tmux, vim, nvim, lazygit, ranger, zathura, nix) from ~ into this repo. The links point at the checkout, not a copy, so edits apply without a rebuild.

packages/ holds the package lists, one name per line: nix.txt for the command-line tools, and brews.txt and casks.txt for Homebrew on the Mac. The pkg command edits them.

pkg is not a package. It is my own zsh script, packages/pkg, which Home Manager links into ~/.local/bin. It runs standard tools: nix-search (from nix-search-cli), nix eval, nix shell, nix flake update, darwin-rebuild or home-manager, brew and git. To look something up, search for those tools rather than pkg.

The other top-level folders are GNU stow packages for Mac apps (karabiner, yabai, zed, vscode, cursor, claude, agents). The i3, sway, rofi, termite and other X11 packages are from an old Arch Linux machine and are not used.

New Mac

SETUP.md is a runbook for an agent: it walks me through the whole setup one step at a time. To start it:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"
sh <(curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -L https://nixos.org/nix/install)
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
git clone https://github.com/sjsivert/dotfiles.git ~/dotfiles

Open a new terminal so nix is on PATH, then:

cd ~/dotfiles && ~/.local/bin/claude

Then ask it to set up the machine from SETUP.md. There's no need to add brew shellenv to ~/.zprofile: after the first switch, nix-darwin puts Homebrew on PATH after the Nix tools.

New Linux machine

The config expects the user sjsivert and the repo in ~/dotfiles.

sudo apt install zsh git curl xz-utils build-essential   # Arch: sudo pacman -S zsh git curl base-devel
sh <(curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon
git clone https://github.com/sjsivert/dotfiles.git ~/dotfiles

Open a new terminal so nix is on PATH, then:

nix --extra-experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' run home-manager/master -- \
  switch -b pre-dotfiles --flake "$HOME/dotfiles"
chsh -s "$(command -v zsh)"

• On ARM, use --flake "$HOME/dotfiles#sjsivert-aarch64".
• -b pre-dotfiles renames files already in the way, such as the distro's ~/.bashrc, instead of failing.
• Log in again so zsh is the login shell. The first start clones the zsh plugins.
• build-essential (Arch: base-devel) gives nvim-treesitter a C compiler.
• The linked .gitconfig rewrites GitHub https URLs to ssh, so git pull in ~/dotfiles needs an SSH key on the machine.

Day to day

pkg wraps the Nix and Homebrew commands. Run pkg alone for help.

To	Run
Find a package	pkg search ripgrep
Find the package that has a command	pkg search -p rg
See details and the version I'd get	pkg info ripgrep
Try it without installing	pkg try ripgrep (opens a shell; exit drops it)
Keep a command-line tool	pkg add ripgrep
Install a Mac app	brew install --cask spotify, later pkg sync
Decide what to keep from brew	pkg sync
Remove a package from any list	pkg rm ripgrep
Apply edits made by hand	pkg switch
Update Nix tools and brew packages	pkg up (or pkg up nix, pkg up brew)

pkg add, rm, sync and up commit the list or flake.lock themselves, after a successful switch, and never push. If a switch fails, the file goes back to how it was.

pkg sync goes through the brew formulae I installed myself and the casks that no list has. Dependencies are left out. For each one it asks: keep it (add it to brews.txt or casks.txt), uninstall it, or skip it. A switch never uninstalls brew packages by itself.

Without pkg:

• Switch on the Mac: sudo darwin-rebuild switch --flake "$HOME/dotfiles#mac".
• Switch on Linux: home-manager switch --flake "$HOME/dotfiles".
• Quote the flake reference. My zsh sets extendedglob, which reads # as a glob.
• git add new .nix files before switching. Nix only sees files git knows about.
• Linked dotfiles apply right away, with no switch.

Not in this repo

• Raycast settings. A password-protected export (.rayconfig, 2026-09-29) is in my Google Drive under My Drive/Personlig/Mac-oppsett/. It stays out of this repo because the repo is public. The password is the one I chose at export; it is not written down here.
• Anything from an employer. Work settings, skills, credentials and tokens never go in here.

Old Arch Linux setup