Ad-Hoc Emacs Packages with Nix
17 hours ago
- Nix can be used as an Emacs package manager to manage packages from MELPA or nixpkgs.
- Users can create ad-hoc packages for software not in MELPA, like inform7-mode, using trivialBuild.
- Nix handles commit pinning, security (SHA-256 hashes), and dependencies for custom packages.
- Examples of custom packaged modes include cabal-mode, xcompose-mode, eat, and lean4-mode.
- For packages needing non-ELisp files (like JSON), melpaBuild is used instead of trivialBuild.
- Nix offers a cleaner alternative to git submodules or Makefiles for vendoring Emacs packages.