Notably, Nix with home-manager. Makes it pretty seamless for me to switch between Linux, Mac, and between employers. I love it even more since I got my home-manager config to be a Nix Flake - this way I have it 100% deterministic and can upgrade/downgrade the tool versions when I like without worrying too much whether I'll be able to go back if something breaks (having flake.lock versioned in git is kinda mandated and checked by Flakes).
I’ve been toying with the idea of switching from stow to home-manager, but I feel like there’s a lot of friction in the form of hard to answer questions.
For example, my emacs config is a literate org file, which is important to me. It is large and complicated and I don’t feel like it’s a good fit for an “all my configs together” solution. I’m not sure how that would fit into home manager and while I’m sure the answer is in the docs somewhere it just seems hard enough to get to that it stops me from really digging in.
> For example, my emacs config is a literate org file, which is important to me. It is large and complicated and I don’t feel like it’s a good fit for an “all my configs together” solution.
I have a literate config that works with home-manager.
The problem is the 800 noweb-ref blocks took 10+ seconds to tangle.
I reported it, and someone optimized tangling to 0.5 seconds. I'm still using the custom patches though since the changes haven't been released or maybe even merged yet.
Not sure if that would be good enough for you, but:
1. There's some syntax for importing files "raw" as strings; I don't recall details now from memory, but it's used extensively e.g. to load contents of .patch files. So you could have an Org file and get it imported.
2. I suspect there's some "smart wrapper" (so-called "module") for emacs in home-manager; it could conflict with your one. But using the "modules" is not mandatory; you can just have h-m put raw files in your ~/.emacs/ dir or whatsit, and add emacs in your $PATH. The thing that may be most tricky would be plugins - sure doable, but could need some nontrivial work. Alternatively, you could try seeing if the emacs module has some "extraConfig" field or something similar, and plug your literate Org there.
If home-manager options for configuration files weren't always that backwards and hard to use. Compared to NixOS a lot is still lacking and you're better off just using it for package management IMO.
