https://garbas.si/tags/tutorial/Recent content in Tutorial on Rok GarbasHugoen-us© Rok GarbasFri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://garbas.si/posts/learn-nix-language/Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://garbas.si/posts/learn-nix-language/<p>I keep watching people copy-paste NixOS configurations without understanding them. They grab a snippet from someone&rsquo;s dotfiles, tweak it until it works, and move on. Then something breaks and they&rsquo;re stuck because they don&rsquo;t know what <code>inherit</code> does, why <code>rec</code> exists, or how functions with curly braces differ from functions with a colon. The fix: learn the language. Not nixpkgs, not the ecosystem. Just the language. About 15 minutes.</p> <p>This post covers only Nix syntax and constructs. After reading it, <code>.nix</code> files should stop looking like alien hieroglyphs. What about nixpkgs, the module system, all those helper functions in <code>lib</code>? Different topic. Later posts.</p>