Darwin, home-manager, zsh, fzf and zsh-fzf-tab

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1

Hi, beginner phoning in here.

I’ve setup nix, darwin and home-manager on a MacOS VM to test this out. Ive used home-manager to enable zsh and fzf. It seems to work fine, Ctrl+R starts the fzf file widget as expected.

fzf = {
  enable = true;
  enableZshIntegration = true;
};

zsh = {
  enable = true;
  enableCompletion = true;
  enableAutosuggestions = true;
  syntaxHighlighting.enable = true;
};

I’m also adding zsh-forgit, zsh-fzf-history-search and zsh-tab via home.packages

home.packages = with pkgs; [ 
    zsh-forgit
    zsh-fzf-history-search
    zsh-fzf-tab
  ];

These packages are installed into the nix/store, but the zsh integration for these tools is not setup it seems.

Is there some way to see what home-manager is trying to to when I run switch, and if it fails on something is it reported in some log?

cheers
mg

2

I assume OP has figured this out already, but for others looking around, one way to achieve this is to source the plugins manually, taking fzf-tab plugin as an example:

programs.zsh.initExtra = ''
    source ${pkgs.zsh-fzf-tab}/share/fzf-tab/fzf-tab.plugin.zsh
'';

The right path to source can be figured out by looking the derivation’s source code, usually in the installPhase we see where are the artifacts copied to.

4 Likes
3

OP had not. Thank you for taking your time to do this.

I had not realised that installing was not sufficient; that I had to put in the zsh configuration myself, but it makes sense now that you explained it.

Again, thanks.

4

no worries, let me also mention that alternatively it’s possible to use programs.zsh.plugins as in the examples in the option documentation https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/options.html#opt-programs.zsh.plugins so we don’t need to source the plugin “manually”, something like:

programs.zsh.plugins = [
      {
        name = "fzf-tab";
        src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
          owner = "Aloxaf";
          repo = "fzf-tab";
          rev = "c2b4aa5ad2532cca91f23908ac7f00efb7ff09c9";
          sha256 = "1b4pksrc573aklk71dn2zikiymsvq19bgvamrdffpf7azpq6kxl2";
        };
      }
    ];

this works because in the root of that repo there’s a fzf-tab.plugin.zsh file, otherwise we would need to also use the file attribute to specify the file name that should be sourced instead.

4 Likes
5

Another alternative - I’d rather install fzf through nix, so:

programs.zsh.plugins = [
  {
    name = "zsh-vi-mode";
    src = "${pkgs.zsh-vi-mode}/share/zsh-vi-mode";
  }
  {
    name = "fzf-tab";
    src = "${pkgs.zsh-fzf-tab}/share/fzf-tab";
  }
  ...
];
1 Like
6

This thread seems to come up when searching for how to configure zsh-vi-mode along with the above integrations of fzf, zsh-fzf-tab, and how the keybindings conflict with fzf when in zsh-vi-mode’s insert mode.

My solution was to remove enableZshIntegration = true; from the fzf block and instead enable

initExtra = ''
  # needed instead of fzf.enableZshIntegration = true so zsh-vi-mode and fzf do not conflict
  zvm_after_init_commands+=(eval "$(fzf --zsh)")
'';

This utilizes a documented after init configuration of zsh-vi-mode: GitHub - jeffreytse/zsh-vi-mode: 💻 A better and friendly vi(vim) mode plugin for ZSH.