I found the nix expression language somewhat confusing at first, but I was able to create simple packages after a couple days. You can find many examples in nix

I found the nix expression language somewhat confusing at first, but I was able to create simple packages after a couple days. You can find many examples in nixpkgs, e.g. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/window-managers/awesome/default.nix https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio... Is that not AwesomeWM btw? There are some rough edges around package discovery (or holes in my knowledge). If you install nix locally (just the package manager, not NixOS), I usually query like this: nix-env -qaP | grep awesome Or I search through my local checkout of nixpkgs source. I'll say that I'm finding nix (just using the package manager, not NixOS) to be a very nice way to manage some custom-compiled packages. I was able to upgrade nginx, for example, from 1.5 to 1.6 with all my plugins and compile flags in place with just a few small changes. This is surely possible through other means, but my previous method of manually downloading/compiling/saving configure flags in my $HOME/src was sloppy.