Vision

To craft a minimal and declarative development environment that is fast, efficient, and keyboard-centric. By favoring terminal-based tools and automating repetitive tasks, we enable developers to work at the speed of thought in a reproducible and consistent setting that encourages safe experimentation.

Guiding Principles

• Minimal. Stay simple with fewer moving parts.
• Keyboard Focused. Utilise keyboard shortcuts to move at the speed of thought.
• Terminal Focused. Prefer customisable terminal tools over one stop graphical applications.
• Efficiency Focused. Commonly repeated activities should be automated away.
• Declarative. Maintain reproducable and consistent environments that safely enable experimentation.
• Secure. Prevent and minimize damage from compromised systems.

Features

Declarative Environment

The entire system is managed declaratively using Nix, ensuring a reproducible, consistent, and experimental environment.

• Nix Flakes: The project is built around a flake.nix, providing reproducible builds and dependency management.
• Declarative Home: User-level configuration is managed declaratively with home-manager, ensuring dotfiles and user packages are consistent across systems.
• Declarative Neovim: Neovim is configured declaratively using nixvim, allowing its configuration and dependencies to be versioned and managed alongside the rest of the system.

Keyboard-Driven Workflow

The environment is heavily optimized for keyboard-centric operation, minimizing mouse usage and maximizing speed.

• Tiling Window Management:
  • Hyprland: Used on Linux for dynamic, keyboard-driven window tiling and workspace management.
  • Aerospace: Used on macOS to provide a similar tiling window manager experience.
• Application Launcher: rofi provides a fast, keyboard-driven way to launch applications, run scripts, and switch windows.
• Terminal & Editor:
  • kitty is the terminal emulator of choice, configured for performance and scriptability.
  • nixvim provides a deeply customized Neovim setup with a rich set of plugins for a modal, keyboard-first editing experience.

Terminal-Centric Tooling

We prefer powerful, composable terminal-based tools over monolithic graphical applications.

• Enhanced Shell: zsh is paired with starship for a rich, informative prompt and atuin for powerful command history search.
• Modern CLI Tools: The system includes a suite of modern, efficient command-line utilities, such as:
  • eza (a modern ls)
  • ripgrep (fast grep alternative)
  • fd (simple find alternative)
  • fzf (command-line fuzzy finder)
  • zoxide (smarter cd)
  • bat (a cat clone with wings)
  • lazygit (a terminal UI for git)

Automation & Efficiency

Repetitive tasks are automated to streamline workflows and reduce cognitive load.

Security

In line with the principle of building a secure system, several features are in place to prevent and minimize damage from potential compromises.

• Secret Management: 1Password is used to manage all secrets, ensuring nothing sensitive is ever stored on disk.

Minimalism and Performance

The selection of tools and configurations prioritizes speed, simplicity, and a low resource footprint.

• Lightweight Components: The stack is built on lean components like hyprland, rofi, and kitty instead of a full desktop environment.

Roadmap

Core Experience

Our primary focus is on refining the core user experience to maximize efficiency and flow.

• Ergonomic Keyboard System: Design and implement a consistent, layered keyboard shortcut system built on home row modifiers.
  • Target both Colemak-DH and QWERTY layouts for portability.
  • Ensure consistency from the OS layer down through applications like Kitty and Neovim.
  • Develop OS-level scripts for advanced window management, such as pinning Kitty tabs to specific workspaces and switching to them directly.

System Expansion

We aim to apply our declarative principles to new environments and use cases.

• Headless Homelab Server: Deploy a fully declarative, non-graphical homelab server.
  • The server runs containerized workloads, including Home Assistant and Emby, using NixOS's native OCI container support to ensure a fully declarative configuration.

Architectural Decision Records

Architectural decisions are documented using ADRs in the doc/adr directory. When creating a new ADR, use the ADR template.