I need help pulling alacritty from unstable on 23.11

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You don’t need to switch to flakes to use single packages from unstable.

First, add the unstable channel

nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable nixpkgs-unstable

Second, in your configuration.nix apply this structure

{ config, pkgs, ... }:  
  
let  
 unstable-pkgs = import <nixpkgs-unstable> {config.allowUnfree = true;};  
in  
{
  # ...
  # ... your existing configuration
  # ...
  
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    thunderbird # package from stable you already have
    vlc  # package from stable you already have
    # ...
  ] ++ (with unstable-pkgs; [
    alacritty # <---- put your unstable package here
    another-unstable-package2
  ]);

  # ...
  # ... your existing configuration
  # ...
}

Third, rebuild with updates

nixos-rebuild --upgrade-all switch

This worked for me when I needed obsidian from unstable when 23.05 was current. The alowUnfree is optional of course.

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