`nix-shell` and "native" tooling

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Hi folks,

I am very, very new to nix and the ecosystem.

I am using nix-shell to pop into a shell with the tools pinned to specific versions. When I do this, I lose some of the integrations that I’ve made to my shell. For example, outside of the nix-shell, my shell is hooked into a tool called atuin, which records the commands I execute. I have vim-like bindings, etc. All of this is lost in nix-shell.

Is it possible to keep those configurations?

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There are some costs, because part of what nix-shell gives you is access to the bash functions that are available to your package’s builder— if you do it this way, it’s less useful for debugging Nix builds— but if you use direnv’s Nix integration to load your Nix shells, it’ll export the environment to your existing, lovingly configured shell.

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