nix-env is a little worse than your examples suggest. It's really: nix-env -iA nixpkgs.package_name Can't forget the leading `nixpkgs.`. And searching is:

nix-env is a little worse than your examples suggest. It's really: nix-env -iA nixpkgs.package_name Can't forget the leading `nixpkgs.`. And searching is: nix-env -qaP '.*keyword.*' Because `--query` takes a regex -- unlike all of the other nix-env subcommands, which take globs. But `nix search` has been available for years, and works great. There's still no nice interface for installing packages, but that's not actually an operation you do very often with Nix, since you're mostly specifying environments in files, rather than mutating your own user environment. Of course, newcomers don't know that, and they want to manipulate things in their PATH like every other package manager, so that's not an excuse for the bad ergonomics. The upcoming version of Nix adds `nix profile install` which is a bit more intuitive. I think Nix's current CLI makes git look positively humane, but I'm encouraged that it's been steadily improving.