"<!DOCTYPE html>\n"
+
html
[ (attrs.lang metadata.lang) ]
[
(head [ ] [ (partials.head context) ])
(body
[
(attrs.classes [
"font-sans"
"bg-white"
])
It might be worth some ifd [1] to allow a step that pre-processes conventional html + tags template files into the form that can be consumed by nixtml.
[1]: or the still-experimental dynamic derivations: https://fzakaria.com/2025/03/10/an-early-look-at-nix-dynamic...
I really wanted the templates to just be nix functions. It shouldn't be an issue to pass the context to an external program with `pkgs.runCommand` or something and then read the result (IFD like you mentioned).
Edit: I'm glad to hear you like it :)
After using Nix for a while I got pretty fed up with the (subjective) unintuitiveness of the language†. It wasn't even that I thought it was a bad language, I just couldn't het it to click (and doubly so after the advent of flakes).
All the same it seems to me like if you grok it it's a great fit for constructing recipes for building things reliably that are part of huge dependency trees, and so it's natural that it would be a good website generator too.
† Luckily others shared this issue, and the result was Guix which solves that problem while introducing its own.
Flakes are not great however, they're what happens when you "overdo it", sadly the momentum is behind flakes because some UX/DX improvements came along with them (lockfile in repo).
I think the stdenv being built on bash is worse than Nix language.
Module system errors can be very hard to troubleshoot because of lazy eval, sadly I can't see a reasonable solution without worse tradeoffs :(
First, flakes are “experimental”, so you have to enable them. Back then there were like three slightly different CLI commands to do it, and it felt like none worked from like 5 tutorial tabs I had open, putting it `experimental-features =` into flake you are trying to switch to does not work obviously.
Then you hit the classic situation where your flake is not committed or staged, so Nix refuses to see it. And instead of telling you that, it prints this abomination of error message "error: path '/nix/store/0ccnxa25whszw7mgbgyzdm4nqc0zwnm8-source/flake.nix' does not exist" (https://determinate.systems/blog/changelog-determinate-nix-3...)
I would not wish learning Nix from zero on my worst enemy, and I say that as someone who uses nix-darwin, devShells, deploy-rs and so on every day. The UX/DX is really bad, but nothing else comes close to its capabilities.
Sorry for rant but without flakes I would not make it.
That has nothing to do with flakes. When I add a "module" to my repos its the same. I have to add it the git repos or nix does not "see" it. And yes, its pretty unintuitive.