nixquick

nixquick is a custom home-manager configuration for television channels to quickly search, install and uninstall nixpkgs across your different nix configuration files out-of-the-box in the television TUI.

It supports NixOS based systems, including both classic setups with systemPackages, Home Manager setups and flake-based setups as long as your pkgs are configured in arrays in nix config files.

Features :

• 🔎 Search and install available nix packages
• 🗑️ Search and uninstall packages installed on your machine
• ⚙️ Trigger rebuild switch optionnaly
• ✅ Support selecting, installing and uninstalling multiple packages simultaneously from different places

It's based on :

• television for customizable fuzzy search TUI
• nix-search-tv to search the available nixpkgs in the television TUI
• nix-editor to edit the nix configuration files and add/remove packages

Demo

video link

Installation

Classic setup

Include the following in your home-manager nix configuration like home.nix:

let
  nixquick = builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/gschurck/nixquick/archive/main.tar.gz";
in
{
  # ...
}

Use main to receive updates automatically, or use latest commit for full reproducibility:

  nixquick = builtins.fetchTarball "https://github.com/gschurck/nixquick/archive/<latest_commit_hash>.tar.gz";

And configure it as you want :

{
  # ...
  nixquick = {
    enable = true;
    switchCommand = "sudo nixos-rebuild switch";
    username = "<your_username>";
    destinations = {
      "/home/<your_username>/nixos-config/configuration.nix" = [
        "environment.systemPackages"
        "users.users.<your_username>.packages"
      ];
      "/home/<your_username>/nixos-config/home.nix" = [ "home.packages" ];
    };
  };
}

Available options:

• nixquick.enable: enable nixquick channels and helpers
• nixquick.switchCommand: optional command run by ... and switch actions
• nixquick.username: optional username used to inspect user and Home Manager packages
• nixquick.destinations: map of config file paths to package attribute paths that nixquick can edit. The first destination attribute will be used as default one when pressing Enter or Ctrl+E.

Then run sudo nixos-rebuild switch to apply the configuration.

Flake setup

Add nixquick as an input and import the Home Manager module from the flake output:

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    home-manager.url = "github:nix-community/home-manager";
    home-manager.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    nixquick.url = "github:gschurck/nixquick";
  };

  outputs = inputs@{ nixpkgs, home-manager, nixquick, ... }: {
    nixosConfigurations.my-host = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      specialArgs = { inherit inputs; };
      modules = [
        home-manager.nixosModules.home-manager
        ({ ... }: {
          home-manager.useGlobalPkgs = true;
          home-manager.users.<your_username> = {
            imports = [ nixquick.homeManagerModules.default ];

            nixquick = {
              enable = true;
              username = "<your_username>";
              flake = {
                enable = true;
                path = "/home/<your_username>/nixos-config";
                nixosConfiguration = "my-host";
              };
              destinations = {
                "/home/<your_username>/nixos-config/configuration.nix" = [
                  "environment.systemPackages"
                  "users.users.<your_username>.packages"
                ];
                "/home/<your_username>/nixos-config/home.nix" = [ "home.packages" ];
              };
            };
          };
        })
      ];
    };
  };
}

In a flake setup, nixquick still edits ordinary .nix module files through destinations. The flake settings only change how nixquick evaluates the active configuration and which default rebuild command it generates.

Start nixquick tv channels

• tv nix-packages to search and install available nix packages
• tv nix-installed-packages to search and uninstall locally configured packages

Television actions

The generated Television channels now always expose both action variants:

• ... and switch: update the Nix file, then run switchCommand
• ... (edit only): update the Nix file without rebuilding

The default keybindings are:

• Enter: run the switch action on default first destination attribute
• Ctrl+E: run the edit only action on default first destination attribute
• Tab: select multiple packages
• F7 from Television to jump to nix-packages
• F8 from Television to jump to nix-installed-packages

This applies to both package installation and package removal.