this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Nix / NixOS

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Hi! I'm trying out Nix and I'm trying to set up and organize everything. Usually I put all my configs in a directory which is also a git repo and synced to my NAS, using the same subfolders they'd be in, and use GNU Stow to symlink the top-level folders (/dotfiles/home/ to /home/username/, /dotfiles/etc to /etc and /dotfiles/usr to /usr) and let it do its thing. Would it cause problems to also do that for configuration.nix?

On Arch I already had a /dotfiles/etc symlinked to /etc for my custom keyboard layouts, which worked fine... until the update which moved the location of the GUI keyboard layouts. It prevented the update so I undid the symlinks, updated, and put them again to the new location... but somehow it broke everything except the tty and no Wayland compositor I tried would work anymore (and there went my record of having never broken Arch since the first install over a year ago 😅 )

So I'm kinda wary of doing it on an even more critical file... but also I'm very lazy and having everything in a single repo is very convenient... How do you do it?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The nix wiki actually contains a way to handle this. If you look up “NixOS configuration editors” it has a couple quick commands to make a folder in your user space and link it to the default location of your nix config. This allows you to edit your config without having to escalate privileges of your editor.