rde: Tools for managing reproducible development environments w/ guix

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1. rde

Set of tools for managing computing environments with GNU Guix. Also, rde contains additional home services for Guix Home and packages for GNU Guix. More info is available at trop.in/rde.

Disclaimer: The project is in an active development stage.

Tip: older Nix source code is available under stale/ directory.

1.1. Principles

1.1.1. Main

Ergonomic: Sane keybindings, good contrast, readable fonts.
Reproducible: Setup can be easily replicated.
Hackable: Easy to throw out or modify any part of setup.
Stateless: All state must be explicit and syncable or temporary.

1.1.2. Secondary

Lightweight and battery efficient: wayland, fast native apps.
Offline: most of workflows and apps should work without network.
Attention-friendly: minimal use of notification and other distractive things.

1.2. Usage

rde heavily relies on Guix Home and Guix System, it's able to provide both a home-environment and operating-system records, which can be used by guix home and guix system respectively. It's not ready for wide audience yet, but for very curious people: my current config is here and I use following commands to apply it:

git clone https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde
cd rde
make

Read more about home-environment at Home Configuration.

GNU Guix and git should be installed before invoking commands above.

The alternative and more apropriate way to use rde will be described later.

1.3. Guix Home

Guix Home is a part of GNU Guix now, no additional installation steps are required.

1.3.1. People's Guix Home configurations

yoctocell's full-blown configuration with variety of software.
krevedkokun's Emacs(Evil)/Wayland(Sway) compact and clean config.

1.4. Channel introduction

In case you want to use rde as a channel, add the following code to your ~/.config/guix/channels.scm, and call guix pull.

(cons*
 (channel
  (name 'rde)
  (url "https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde")
  (introduction
   (make-channel-introduction
    "257cebd587b66e4d865b3537a9a88cccd7107c95"
    (openpgp-fingerprint
     "2841 9AC6 5038 7440 C7E9  2FFA 2208 D209 58C1 DEB0"))))
 %default-channels)

1.5. Just a screenshot

A picture to catch your eye)

Figure 1: Latest rde screenshot

1.5.1. Tools

Purpose	Tool
Window Manager	Sway
Terminal	Alacritty
Login Shell	Bash
Interactive Unix Shell	Zsh
Service Manager/Init	Shepherd
Filesystem	Btrfs
Everything Else (:	Emacs

1.6. Community

There are a few mailing lists you can subscribe and/or post with your existing email account:

~abcdw/rde-announce@lists.sr.ht: for news and updates.
~abcdw/rde-discuss@lists.sr.ht: for discussions and questions.
~abcdw/rde-devel@lists.sr.ht: for patches and development related discussions.

1.7. Contributing

1.7.1. New features, fixes or ideas

Send mails, optionally with inline patches to rde-devel mailing list.

1.7.2. Documentation

For Guix Home documentation maintained in guix repo.

Author: Andrew Tropin

Created: 2021-10-07 Thu 05:41

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