Apps and services

The first two tabs are a catalogue: about 64 apps and a set of services that nixarchy knows how to install properly, rather than as a bare binary.

Why a catalogue at all

Because “install Firefox” and “install the firefox package” are not the same thing on NixOS.

The package gets you a binary. The NixOS module gets you the binary plus its policies, its defaults, and whatever integration the module author wrote — for Firefox that means enterprise policies and declarative extensions. Same name, different outcome, and the better one is not the one you would guess.

So the catalogue maps each row to how NixOS actually installs that thing. Some rows are plain nixpkgs packages, some are NixOS modules, some are built by nixarchy because nixpkgs does not carry them at all, and a couple have no NixOS equivalent and say so in the row rather than pretending.

Each row shows the line it will write. That is not decoration — it is how you tell a module row from a package row before you pick it.

Turning one on

SPACE, on the row under the cursor.

Nothing is installed. One line in ~/.config/nixarchy/apps.nix (or services.nix) stops being a comment and starts being configuration. SPACE again comments it back out.

The state you see is read from the file every time, not remembered. Two panels open at once cannot disagree about which way the toggle goes.

Filtering

/ here filters what is already listed, instantly, and keeps the on/off state. That is different from Selection and Options, where / searches an index of a hundred thousand things and replaces the list.

The difference is deliberate: a catalogue of sixty-odd rows is something you can read, so narrowing it should not cost you the information you came for.

Services

The same idea, for daemons. Some rows are nixarchy bundles — a service plus the handful of options that make it useful — and some are the plain upstream option. The line beside each row tells you which.

A service that is not in this catalogue is not missing. It is just options, and the Options tab is how you reach it. There are over 2,000 services.*.enable options in nixpkgs and a curated list was never going to be all of them.

.settings rows

A row drawn with ≡ is not an app. It is the attrset that configures one — firefox.settings next to firefox.

SPACE and RETURN on it do nothing except tell you so, and point you at the file. That is on purpose: the writer would refuse it, correctly, and a refusal on screen reads like something broke. Answering the question here instead is the honest version.