TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles

TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles May 21, 2026 The standard answer to managing dotfiles on NixOS is home-manager. I’ve never used it, due to two aesthetic and one practical objection: I avoid dependencies, especially in nix, which rivals Python in the number of approaches to dependency management. home-manager installs packages for the current user only, which makes sense on non-NixOS systems. But on a single-user desktop system, I prefer having just one set of packages. Having a source of truth for dotfiles be in nix store requires rebuilding your system to change config, which gets in the way of Emacs-style direct tinkering. The approach I like is storing dotfiles in the same repository as flake.nix / configuration.nix and symlinking them in place. The problem here is that NixOS seemingly doesn’t have a “native” way to say that /a/b/c should be a symlink to /c/d/e. Or has it? If you search options for symlink, you’ll learn about environment.etc which allows you to configure symlinks,…