Concrete difference between Hjem and Home Manager ?

[PierreBeucher]

Hi there, great project ! README clearly mentions the similarity and inspiration from Home Manager but in practice what is different between those two? Could you highlight what's possible / not possible with Hjem that would (not) be possible with Home Manager ? Thanks

[NotAShelf]

You can think of Hjem as a leaner (and meaner) implementation of Home-Manager's home.file for the time being. It allows you to link files in place, and for now not much else.

The main difference would be that Hjem does not have a module system, like Home-Manager. We intend for Hjem to be a small and convenient tool that is cheap and easy to maintain. The gap of a module system is filled by Hjem-Rum.

On the question of what's possible and not possible, Hjem currently allows linking files in place and provides a similar interface to home.packages but it lacks a cleanup mechanism (so stale links are not cleaned up, see #9 and #10) and there isn't a mechanism to handle session variables yet. Ultimately we would like for Hjem to provide the framework to build your own Home-Manager-like module system without half of your system depending on the maintenance status and quirks of a 3rd party module system on top of nixpkgs. With Hjem, you are equipped to build your own. Though again, Hjem-Rum is a Home-Manager replacement if you feel less comfortable managing everything yourself.

Darwin support is also not yet implemented, but it's something we'd like to support in the future.