Kelp – simple replacement for homebrew on macOS

It’s a bit surprising to hear nix described as “not as comprehensive”, considering they’ve basically built a whole OS around it, but I’m curious about your take on this specifically.

There's an explanation somewhere as to why. It has to do with "not breaking" stuff relying on it. So I guess it only answers "why we won't fix it".

Anyway, I don't think this is enough. Or I guess it only works to stop the trigger during install? I have the NO_AUTO_UPDATE set up, and recently needed to update (or upgrade? who knows) a single package and it somehow ended up with Homebrew working for over two hours. I saw it installing python at least two times.

Maybe also these, to limit other annoyances:

  export HOMEBREW_NO_EMOJI=1
  export HOMEBREW_NO_ENV_HINTS=1
  export HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP=1

because the fundamental ethos of homebrew and a lot of “modern” tools is to prioritize the conservation of attention. Aka “don’t make me think“ which, ironically, appears to often be adopted, not only on behalf of users, but at a meta level, so things which might well deserve prompts are simply pre-configured.

some charity is due here, because this is the culture, and also because for any software tool of sufficient complexity, there is always more to think about than attention to give. But the culture could use more improvement and reflection here.

It's a good question, and to be honest, I occasionally get confused about what tools are installed with what tool manager (especially as there's also `uv tool` in the mix too).

Devbox for me hasn't clicked as a project-level tool manager, mostly because it doesn't really play nicely with the way our projects are set up causing a lot of shell issues for other team members. Mise has been trouble free on that front though, works perfectly for everyone on the team, and has some nice runner type functionality too (like `just` or `make`). If you've not tried Mise, I recommend giving it a go, it's really nice.

I think Nix has a marketing issue as it goes so deep. But if you're going to consider it only as an alternative to homebrew, you don't have to know anything aside from different CLI invocations: `nix-shell -iA <package>` to install, and maybe a step up with `nix-shell -p <package> --run <cmd>` to run without installing. You don't have to use nix-darwin or managing configs and the Nix language at all.

I'm interested in how you use that homebrew-to-nix converter, if you have links to configs or can describe it briefly!

I agree that nix-darwin is a bit overkill, I mainly use it for the homebrew integration, but I think so is home-manager, I don't keep user app configs in Nix since they are never exhaustive and more effort than it's worth.

I sort of get what you're saying and I've had a few sporadic issues myself, once or twice I had to reinstall (although might have been my mishandling), but overall I can't see a better solution than this. Plus I can share the configs with Linux.

Part of the appeal of Homebrew (which is also a blessing and a curse from time to time) is the fact that packages are maintained, meaning people make conscious decisions when to pull in updated versions or stick with an older release, and have some logic behind all that mess.

There are always tradeoffs with any packaging system, no matter how transparent/simple.

I think having venv like project installations would be nice as well. Let me write a Portfile for my current repo, use the system package cache if available, otherwise install locally. With clones it wouldn’t even require much extra space.