Released: nixmate — a TUI for managing NixOS

forgive me for making assumptions, but for transparency, is this like some vibe coding type of thing?

edit: the OP DM’d me stating their account seemed unable to respond to threads yet, tho for transparency, let me note my experience with this tool here.

i guess checking the readme and trying it out things felt a bit unnatural, maybe not even just for the llm-reminiscent use of emoji in the docs, but just the polish ratio between the ‘marketing side’ (readme, mascot, emojis) vs program UX (+ low commit count) felt… less like what a programmer would produce, i guess. the tendency to key-binds far from the home row (F-keys, number keys), the high level of apparent features while quite some did not actually work for me, things just felt a bit off, i guess.

i hadn’t tried the error translator yet, tho maybe i’m not the target audience for feedback on that one anymore, as a user since (minus a year) 2018 now.

on a non-flake nixos configuration located outside /etc/nixos, my experience was:

  • 1 generations: packages/diff tabs showed none
  • 2 error translator: did not try, i’m mostly used to the error messages now
  • 3 services & ports: i found ports here (normally using netstat -tulpn), but no services seemed listed
  • 4 storage: this showed me i didn’t need to clean up, so i did not try further
  • 5 showcase: this generated images, but i felt i did not need this
  • 6 this seemed to work and seemed useful-ish
  • 7 rebuild: i did not try this (i was used to setting NIX_PATH’s nixos-configuration to my path outside /etc/nixos, hadn’t bothered checking if i’d set it declaratively yet)
  • 8 flake inputs: did not try as my nixos config is not flaked-based
  • 9 package search: not working (i normally use nps)
  • 0 doctor: did not try, no issues to remedy
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