Add nix flake

[fidgetingbits]

Adds a flake I have been using for development on a Nix box, which I've confirmed works to run pre-commit linting, correctly installs plugins, can debug extension, etc.

Checklist

• [-] I have added tests
• [-] I have updated the docs and cheatsheet
• [-] I have not broken the cheatsheet

[pokey]

Sorry I'm not familiar with nix flake. What is this PR doing?

[fidgetingbits]

Nix flakes are basically packaging management files (written in the nix functional programming language) that projects can add that allow the nix package manager to automatically setup a shell environment of locked packages, without globally installing them. So basically someone can just activate the flake development environment and everything needed to develop/build is automatically installed there.

Assuming a project is something actually packaged like an installable tool, you can also have the flake describe how to build the package for you so you can install/run it. Not sure how that works for vscode extension installation in nix and didn't bother looking yet.

Nix is used for package package management by Mac (replacement for homebrew) and Linux users wanting fully reproducible environments, and also is what NixOS is centered around using.

I'm doing the cursorless hacking from a NixOS setup, so just threw it together and figured I'd send a PR in case it would be useful for other nix users that might hack on cursorless in the future. That said, I totally appreciate if you don't want to add this :D

[pokey]

Reproducibility is my middle name. I'll have a look

[auscompgeek]

I did try out this PR on x86 macOS, and it appears to work as expected, with the known caveat that if you run VSCode within a nix environment then the command server and Talon command client will fail to find each other.

I'll admit I didn't test it for too long though, and still need to check the pre-commit hook installed correctly (but that looks correct 😅)

[fidgetingbits]

Is that known caveat detailed anywhere? Is it Mac specific? I don't have that problem on NixOS afaik, as I've been using talon/cursorless for the development.

The pre-commit hooks seemed to install for me and run fine when I sent the other PRs but definitely worth someone else verifying.

[auscompgeek]

I noted it somewhere once I worked out the mismatching $TMPDIR was the issue. Might be mentioned in the talonhub/community issues.

Edit: here we are: talonhub/community#966 (comment)

[pokey]

I am going to completely defer to @auscompgeek to review this one, as I'm way out of my depth. I left one comment tho to give the appearance of being useful / competent 🤓

[fidgetingbits]

Since I just had to force push again (I seem to do this a lot in my PRs), I'm curious if someone can tell me the trick to merge upstream changes into the PR branch without it triggering like a thousand file updates? I don't seem to easily find an explanation of what I'm missing, but you folks presumably know. I do know about the button in the github interface, but presumably there is some "right" cli way

[auscompgeek]

I think you're just seeing GitHub's eventual consistency behaviour? I see 1 commit with 3 files changed, which I presume is expected.

[fidgetingbits]

I think you're just seeing GitHub's eventual consistency behaviour? I see 1 commit with 3 files changed, which I presume is expected.

Hrm, I'll look into what that is.

But in this case it's only the 3 files changed because I force pushed. I did a soft reset back to a shared commit with upstream, rebase, then apply a new commit with all my changes and force push.

[pokey]

@auscompgeek are you happy with this PR? As mentioned above I don't know enough about nix to be a competent reviewer here

[fidgetingbits]

I'll start tweaking this again so I can use it to build/test neovim, but it would still be nice to get it in as is in the meantime, as I still have to pull it into every new branch I create atm if I want to test anything. Happy to change anything else needed.

[jaresty]

Haven't tried this but I think it's a great idea. Maybe I'll try nix again in the future.

[pokey]

@auscompgeek I'm just waiting for an approval from you on this one and I'll merge

[fidgetingbits]

Looks like switching to corepack breaks one of the pre-commit hooks. Wasn't something I had tested after switching. Will revert that change and just stick with hardcoded node 18 package for now I think. If it breaks in the future because someone updates package.json then I'll fix the flake. Doesn't seem any different than corepack breaking things now, so I'd rather just stick to what works atm. Can see more context here

That said, there is another pre-commit hook related bug introduced as of March, that both versions of the flake, which is that the prettier hook now has an external npm dependency that pre-commit itself won't auto install, as it's specific to .prettierc config, so I now need to hack around that until I get an associated prettier-plugin-tailwindcss package upstreamed in nixpkgs. Will fix that and update this PR, but means merging this PR will have to wait.

[fidgetingbits]

Looks like switching to corepack breaks one of the pre-commit hooks. Wasn't something I had tested after switching. Will revert that change and just stick with hardcoded node 18 package for now I think. If it breaks in the future because someone updates package.json then I'll fix the flake. Doesn't seem any different than corepack breaking things now, so I'd rather just stick to what works atm. Can see more context here

Did some more testing while fixing the tailwind issue and it seems like the chai issue was due to me not running pre-commit clean after I switched to corepack. Seems like it does in fact work, so I won't revert after all.

I ran pre-commit run -a and noticed some other scripts that will break due to missing python dependencies, so also now add those to the packages. tbh I don't understand why those aren't being installed by pre-commit, because the dependencies don't seem to be used directly by cursorless. I also rebased and squashed the 3 commits that were here, so now just back to one.

[fidgetingbits]

When I re-run direnv allow, now that pnpm install is used, I get warning spam:

❯ direnv allow
direnv: loading ~/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/.envrc                                                                                                                                                                      
direnv: using flake
direnv: nix-direnv: using cached dev shell
Scope: all 12 workspace projects
Lockfile is up to date, resolution step is skipped
Already up to date
 WARN  Failed to create bin at /home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/jest-config@29.7.0_@types+node@18.18.2_ts-node@10.9.2_@types+node@18.18.2_typescript@5.4.3_/node_modules/jest-config/node_modules/.
bin/ts-node. ENOENT: no such file or directory, chmod '/home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/jest-config@29.7.0_@types+node@18.18.2_ts-node@10.9.2_@types+node@18.18.2_typescript@5.4.3_/node_modules/je
st-config/node_modules/.bin/ts-node'
 WARN  Failed to create bin at /home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/ts-jest@29.1.2_@babel+core@7.24.3_@jest+types@29.6.3_babel-jest@29.7.0_@babel+core@7.24.3__es_x5o3lutkgkkiogdpvhimm74uee/node_modul
es/ts-jest/node_modules/.bin/jest. ENOENT: no such file or directory, chmod '/home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/ts-jest@29.1.2_@babel+core@7.24.3_@jest+types@29.6.3_babel-jest@29.7.0_@babel+core@7.
24.3__es_x5o3lutkgkkiogdpvhimm74uee/node_modules/ts-jest/node_modules/.bin/jest'
 WARN  Failed to create bin at /home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/html-webpack-plugin@5.6.0_webpack@5.91.0_esbuild@0.20.2_webpack-cli@5.1.4_@webpack-cli+genera_o5z57zhf57uxuhfj26re5e4zha/node_modul
es/html-webpack-plugin/node_modules/.bin/html-minifier-terser. ENOENT: no such file or directory, chmod '/home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/html-webpack-plugin@5.6.0_webpack@5.91.0_esbuild@0.20.2_w
ebpack-cli@5.1.4_@webpack-cli+genera_o5z57zhf57uxuhfj26re5e4zha/node_modules/html-webpack-plugin/node_modules/.bin/html-minifier-terser'
 WARN  Failed to create bin at /home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/ts-jest@29.1.2_@babel+core@7.24.3_@jest+types@29.6.3_babel-jest@29.7.0_@babel+core@7.24.3__es_x5o3lutkgkkiogdpvhimm74uee/node_modul
es/ts-jest/node_modules/.bin/semver. ENOENT: no such file or directory, chmod '/home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/ts-jest@29.1.2_@babel+core@7.24.3_@jest+types@29.6.3_babel-jest@29.7.0_@babel+core@
7.24.3__es_x5o3lutkgkkiogdpvhimm74uee/node_modules/ts-jest/node_modules/.bin/semver'
 WARN  Failed to create bin at /home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/html-webpack-plugin@5.6.0_webpack@5.91.0_esbuild@0.20.2_webpack-cli@5.1.4_@webpack-cli+genera_o5z57zhf57uxuhfj26re5e4zha/node_modul
es/html-webpack-plugin/node_modules/.bin/webpack. ENOENT: no such file or directory, chmod '/home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/html-webpack-plugin@5.6.0_webpack@5.91.0_esbuild@0.20.2_webpack-cli@5.
1.4_@webpack-cli+genera_o5z57zhf57uxuhfj26re5e4zha/node_modules/html-webpack-plugin/node_modules/.bin/webpack'
 WARN  15 other warnings
Done in 1.8s
direnv: export +DETERMINISTIC_BUILD +PYTHONHASHSEED +PYTHONNOUSERSITE +PYTHONPATH +_PYTHON_HOST_PLATFORM +_PYTHON_SYSCONFIGDATA_NAME +buildPhase +dontAddDisableDepTrack +phases +preferLocalBuild +shellHook ~CONFIG_SHELL ~HOST
_PATH ~NIX_BINTOOLS ~NIX_CC ~NIX_CFLAGS_COMPILE ~NIX_LDFLAGS ~PATH ~XDG_DATA_DIRS ~buildInputs ~builder ~name ~nativeBuildInputs ~out ~shell ~stdenv

The files do seem to exist though, for example the first warning:

❯ ls -al /home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/jest-config@29.7.0_@types+node@18.18.2_ts-node@10.9.2_@types+node@18.18.2_typescript@5.4.3_/node_modules/jest-config/node_modules/.bin/ts-node
.rwxr-xr-x 1.4k aa 18  6月 17:24  /home/aa/dev/talon/fidgetingbits-cursorless/node_modules/.pnpm/jest-config@29.7.0_@types+node@18.18.2_ts-node@10.9.2_@types+node@18.18.2_typescript@5.4.3_/node_modules/jest-config/node_modul
es/.bin/ts-node

Seems things mostly function (tested pnpm compile and pnpm build), so seems safe to ignore. Just noisy, so figured I'd mention in case anyone has ideas.

[pokey]

This PR is getting (quite) long in the tooth 😅 so I decided to try it out locally myself in preparation for merging it. I've never used nix before. Seems like it's working to me, so I'd be inclined to merge. Here's what I did from top to bottom:

➜ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install
info: downloading installer https://install.determinate.systems/nix/tag/v0.19.0/nix-installer-aarch64-darwin
`nix-installer` needs to run as `root`, attempting to escalate now via `sudo`...
Password:
Nix install plan (v0.19.0)
Planner: macos (with default settings)

Planned actions:
* Create an encrypted APFS volume `Nix Store` for Nix on `disk3` and add it to `/etc/fstab` mounting on `/nix`
* Extract the bundled Nix (originally from /nix/store/xsmwdm9d3br9mhi14msbf346zfv7v56l-nix-binary-tarball-2.21.2/nix-2.21.2-aarch64-darwin.tar.xz)
* Create a directory tree in `/nix`
* Move the downloaded Nix into `/nix`
* Create build users (UID 301-332) and group (GID 30000)
* Configure Time Machine exclusions
* Setup the default Nix profile
* Place the Nix configuration in `/etc/nix/nix.conf`
* Configure the shell profiles
* Configuring zsh to support using Nix in non-interactive shells
* Create a `launchctl` plist to put Nix into your PATH
* Configure Nix daemon related settings with launchctl
* Remove directory `/nix/temp-install-dir`


Proceed? ([Y]es/[n]o/[e]xplain): 
 INFO Step: Create an encrypted APFS volume `Nix Store` for Nix on `disk3` and add it to `/etc/fstab` mounting on `/nix`
 INFO Step: Provision Nix
 INFO Step: Create build users (UID 301-332) and group (GID 30000)
 INFO Step: Configure Time Machine exclusions
 INFO Step: Configure Nix
 INFO Step: Configuring zsh to support using Nix in non-interactive shells
 INFO Step: Create a `launchctl` plist to put Nix into your PATH
 INFO Step: Configure Nix daemon related settings with launchctl
 INFO Step: Remove directory `/nix/temp-install-dir`
Nix was installed successfully!
To get started using Nix, open a new shell or run `. /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/etc/profile.d/nix-daemon.sh`

➜ . /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/etc/profile.d/nix-daemon.sh

➜ nix run "nixpkgs#hello"
Hello, world!

➜ nix build
error: flake 'git+file:///Users/pokey/src/cursorless' does not provide attribute 'packages.aarch64-darwin.default' or 'defaultPackage.aarch64-darwin'

➜ nix develop
bash: /Users/pokey/.rc: No such file or directory
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/pre-commit
Scope: all 12 workspace projects
Lockfile is up to date, resolution step is skipped
Already up to date

   ╭─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
   │                                                                 │
   │                Update available! 9.0.6 → 9.4.0.                 │
   │   Changelog: https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/releases/tag/v9.4.0   │
   │     Run "corepack prepare pnpm@9.4.0 --activate" to update.     │
   │                                                                 │
   │     Follow @pnpmjs for updates: https://twitter.com/pnpmjs      │
   │                                                                 │
   ╰─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Done in 2.8s

(nix:nix-shell-env) pokey@MacBook-Pro-9:~/src/cursorless$ ls
CHANGELOG.md     bashbooks                           cursorless-talon      flake.lock    out                  pyproject.toml            tsconfig.json
CONTRIBUTING.md  bundle.vsix                         cursorless-talon-dev  flake.nix     package.json         queries                   typings
LICENSE          bundles                             cursorless.nvim       fonts         packages             schemas
NOTICE.md        changelog                           data                  images        patches              scripts
README.md        cursorless-development-0.26.0.vsix  dist                  netlify.toml  pnpm-lock.yaml       third-party-licenses.csv
SECURITY.md      cursorless-snippets                 docs                  node_modules  pnpm-workspace.yaml  tsconfig.base.json

(nix:nix-shell-env) pokey@MacBook-Pro-9:~/src/cursorless$ pnpm transform-recorded-tests

> cursorless@0.1.0 transform-recorded-tests /Users/pokey/src/cursorless
> ./packages/common/scripts/my-ts-node.js packages/cursorless-engine/src/scripts/transformRecordedTests/index.ts

You can see in that last step that I'm successfully running one of our scripts, so I think I'll declare victory.

@auscompgeek if there's any remaining improvements you think we should make, it would be awesome if you could file a quick follow-up issue. Thanks to everyone involved here!