Nix search nixpkgs

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When i search something with nix search nixpkgs
2022-06-12T23:26:18,853613024+03:00
2022-06-12T23:26:48,106852272+03:00
So in nix search nixpkgs it says its legacypackages. İ dont want to see it. İ just want to see that it only types assaultcube how to do it?

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$ nix search nixpkgs assaultcube 2>/dev/null| sed -e 's|legacy.*linux\.||'
* assaultcube (1.3.0.2)
  Fast and fun first-person-shooter based on the Cube fps

Or just live with it. Thats how we access things in a flake world anyway…

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I have to ask. This is the first time I’ve seen ‘|’ in sed expressions instead of ‘/’. What is the difference and why prefer pipe?

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It is just one of the possible delimiters, and I am used to them, as I often have slashes in my regexes and I want avoid escaping them.

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The nix legacy world and nix flakes world are still somewhat distant from each other… Also, for a newcomer legacyPackages sounds quite misleading.

There is another problem with the modern nix search – it has lost the less pager that was enabled by default and worked well. Moreover, there is no concise way of enabling it, because a naive nix search nixpkgs clang | less prints a mixture:

evaluating 'legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.bear'* legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.bear (3.0.20)
evaluating 'legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.ccls'  Tool that generates a compilation database for clang tooling

* legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.ccls (0.20210330)
evaluating 'legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.clang-analyzer'  A c/c++ language server powered by clang

* legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.clang (11.1.0)
  A C language family frontend for LLVM (wrapper script)

evaluating 'legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.clang-analyzer'* legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.clang-analyzer (13.0.1)
evaluating 'legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.clang-manpages'  Clang Static Analyzer

* legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.clang-manpages (11.1.0)
  man page for Clang 11.1.0

From an end user perspective the lack of easy to type and read nix search is a big loss. Even for an experienced nix user like me (but who did not use flakes before).

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legacyPackages does not mean that any packages in it are legacy, it is about the mixed semantic of libraries, packages, builders, fetchers, etc.

Though I agree that paging is hardly possible as there is always the progress “streamed”.

I really wish that the experimental commands would be more sensible to a TTY being available.

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I wanna +1 that and add that I find it quite a bad idea to restructure the way tools are used when users are already used to them.
‘nix search’ now has a slightly changed syntax in comparison to before which gave the feeling of falling back down on the ultra steep learning curve nixos would already provide.

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It seems I’ve found the workaround for paging:

nix search nixpkgs | less -F

Somehow the -F option prevents the progress text from being interleaved with the actual output.
Ah, it is not entirely true - there are still some progress messages.

Still the best option is to redirect stderr:

nix search nixpkgs 2>/dev/null | less
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Sorry, I’m just starting with Nix this week (installed along a Ubuntu 24.04 box), and I was not understanding why my installation would return everything as legacyPackages.x86_64 when I do a nix search.

From reading here, is it correct my understanding that it doesn’t mean anything, and it’s simply noise ?

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It does mean something of course, but I dont think the differences should matter much to you. I answered your question more in depth on your stack overflow post

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I would recommend a better (3rd-party) tool:

There’s also this:

GitHub - peterldowns/nix-search-cli: CLI for searching packages on search.nixos.org

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