Temporarily replaces a symlink with a writeable copy of the link target and opens it up with an editor of your choice to allow quick changes. Afterwards automatically restores the symlink.

With config files managed by nix / home-manager it can be quite cumbersome to make many (small) changes in a short amount of time (e.g. to find just the right colour value), because of the need to build a new NixOS / home-manager generation everytime, which will at least take a few seconds.

This tool allows quick & dirty editing of these files so you can find just the right config values and are able to transfer these to your NixOS / home-manager configuration afterwards.

Get a temporary shell with nixln-edit available:

nix --extra-experimental-features "nix-command flakes" shell github:nlintn/nixln-edit

Now to use the tool, just do nixln-edit LINK_NAME (nixln-edit LINK_NAME -e EDITOR to use an editor other than $EDITOR)

git clone https://github.com/nlintn/nixln-edit.git cd nixln-edit mkdir build cd build cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. cmake --build .

The nixln-edit binary will now be available in nixln-edit/build/src/nixln-edit.