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dmitriid | karma 7372 | avg karma 1.15 · 2021-07-14 08:08:45

1. How common is it to search outside nixpkgs?

2. How common is it to install from outside nixpkgs?

Depending on the answers to the above:

`nix install packagename` should default to nixpkgs and install into currently active profile (if auch a thing as currently active profile is a thing in nix, of course)

`nix search packagename` should default to searching nixpkgs

Boom. You improved developer/user experience 100-fold with little effort.

Edit: 99.9% of examples in the linked page have nixpkgs# prefix for packages. Just drop it, and make it default. Everyone will thank you.

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kaba0 | karma 9701 | avg karma 1.18 · 2021-07-14 08:26:45

I remember there is a thread on this exact issue. The problem is more that there is no one nixpkgs channel, but several.

callahad | karma 11203 | avg karma 6.05 · 2021-07-14 09:30:08

Much more common than you would expect coming from a traditional package manager, since Nix freely allows multiple versions of packages to coexist. E.g., many folks run a stable release of NixOS but install select user packages from unstable, while most development environment and packaging scenarios will pin to a specific commit of nixpkgs.

Nevertheless, there is an alternative CLI that infers "nixpkgs" when omitted, but I can't seem to find it right now.

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lucideer | karma 13373 | avg karma 3.96 · 2021-07-14 12:13:46

I think nix already does what you want for search, but the install suggestion is a good idea.

`nix install packagename` would fall outside the current command convention (since `profile` is a command and `install` is a subcommand of profile), so they would have to introduce a new top-level command "install" which is aliased to `profile install`. Given the `nix` command itself is a newer/experimental alternative to `nix-env`, et al., in a seemingly similar spirit to `apt-get/apt-cache` -vs- `apt`, I think creating such an alias would be a very reasonable thing to do.

`nix search packagename` afaik currently does what you (probably) want. It defaults to searching in both `packages.<system>` & `legacyPackages.<system>`, so nixpkgs will be included. I suspect the inclusion of `nixpkgs` in the examples above is actually narrowing the search, possibly for speed: doing `nix search packagename` is currently a bit slow.

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