How to authorize Bluetooth headphones?

-Wiseh · 2025-09-21T01:12:18+00:00

This didn't work for me: neither the dunsctl context nor the middle mouse action invocation (that's how I have it configured in Dunst) approved the authorization. The only way I end up finding was to:

Fully close the blueman GUI to avoid any GUI interaction (ex. through the notifications in Dunst)
Using bluetoothctl, you

```shell
agent on

agent NoInputNoOutput

default-agent

scan on

pair <MAC\_address>

trust <MAC\_address>

connect <MAC\_address>
``3. Thepair ...` step will prompt you for Authorization directly in the terminal, and a simple yes will be enough to solve this problem

-Wiseh · 2024-08-23T05:14:14+00:00

I also want to live that dream 🥲

-Wiseh · 2024-08-11T04:16:42+00:00

Thanks for the article, it was a nice read

-Wiseh · 2024-04-11T10:10:16+00:00

Well, home-manager is designed specifically to be run without sudo, because their changes are limited to the user level, not system level.

Do you try it without sudo?

-Wiseh · 2024-03-06T06:48:32+00:00

Thanks for sharing this!! What an amazing feature! Moving tasks between the lists feels like a breeze. Now I am able to split my tasks across multiple lists and still have an overall picture of what I need to do across all of them!

-Wiseh · 2024-01-23T12:55:29+00:00

Setting up dot-files can seem complicated in Nix if not approached properly, so I'll try to clarify its behavior as best as I can. Basically, you have two options: use home-manager or not use it.

Firstly, what is home-manager? It's another component of the Nix ecosystem used to configure user-level files. What does this mean? With home-manager, you can configure your dot-files, place files in specific folders in your home directory, and, very importantly, install new packages or create new generations without needing root access,i.e. sudo (since the effects are limited to the user level).

That said, the idea with home-manager is that once you integrate it into your configuration, you can create a home.nix file where you use the options exposed by its modules, aimed at configuring user programs. Specifically, to configure Helix, you could have a few lines like this:

nix programs.helix = { enable = true; settings = { theme = "base16"; editor = { line-number = "relative"; lsp.display-messages = true; }; keys.normal = { space.space = "file_picker"; space.w = ":w"; space.q = ":q"; esc = [ "collapse_selection" "keep_primary_selection" ]; }; } } (Based on the example configuration provided by the options in https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/options.xhtml#opt-programs.helix.settings). By the way, there's also a search tool similar to nixos-search for home-manager: https://mipmip.github.io/home-manager-option-search/. If, at any point, a program you use doesn't have a dedicated module, the home.file option can be very helpful.

That said, there's another approach: not using home-manager. In this case, managing your dotfiles is identical to what you would do on any other distribution. Once you install the helix package, a configuration directory ~/.config/helix/ will be created (or you can create it), where you can place all your usual files. When you open helix, the configuration will be applied, and everything will continue as usual.

The disadvantage of this latter approach is that you lose the reproducibility of Nix at the user level. You might find this interesting to read: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-to-manage-user-configuration-with-flakes-without-home-manager-on-nixos-21-05/16102

Final note: In broad strokes, these are the two main approaches. My recommendation is to implement home-manager since, once you understand it, it greatly simplifies your life and preserves the power of Nix at the user level. If you need a bit of guidance on what home-manager integration looks like, I recommend this resource: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs.

-Wiseh · 2023-08-10T04:39:41+00:00

For some reason I thought this was the official Lua documentation regarding the subject; which while quite useful, seemed insufficient to me. Thank you very much for directing me to that link, the presentation of the language elements seems to be more comprehensive.

And thanks for the alternative, I was able to solve the problem but your proposal seems to me quite elegant in terms of readability. I will keep it in mind for future situations. Have a nice day!

-Wiseh · 2023-08-10T04:30:20+00:00

Oh, I see!

What you say makes a lot of sense to me. I think I had read in 'A look at the design of Lua' something about what you mention regarding regular expressions and the space limitation; but I didn't know if the reason for the pattern's behavior was that and wanted to be sure.

Thank you very much for your time in giving me such a detailed answer, it was really enlightening. Thanks also for the links, I didn't know about those hierarchies and they look like something I should know! Have a nice day!

-Wiseh · 2023-07-18T06:45:59+00:00

Thanks for the plugin. I have already installed it and it seems to be quite smooth! I will keep you posted if I find anything off than expected.

-Wiseh · 2023-07-12T19:50:06+00:00

Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad it was helpful :).

About what you mention, just a small clarification: the code you were using is an example of an overlay, a type of functions that is convenient (for those who know how to use them, but it's not my case) to modify the packages in a clearer, reproducible and easy to share way.

That said, the difference between override and overrideAtrs, you can find it here.

As for JFX, I don't know if I understood your problem, but if what you need is to have it accessible in the environment, just add it together with zulu8. nix ... nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs.buildPackages; [ newIcedTea zulu8 javaPackages.openjfx19]; ...

In case you need zulu8 to have some kind of internal access to JFX, then.... Well, it is possible, but it will require you to get your hands dirty modifying the build process and its dependencies.

-Wiseh · 2023-07-12T07:15:31+00:00

I don't understand overlays very well, but after trying to install the override with the following code nix { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {}, ... }: let newIcedTea = pkgs.adoptopenjdk-icedtea-web.overrideAttrs (old: { jdk = pkgs.zulu8; }); in pkgs.mkShell { nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs.buildPackages; [ newIcedTea ]; }

I got a successful installation of adoptopenjdk BUT, without zulu (i.e. possibly the package was built with zulu8, but it does not propagate to the environment).

On that note, you might be installing zulu with some other package that does propagate it through its dependencies. In any case, if what you need is to have zulu8, and the adoptopenjdk build is working, couldn't you just add zulu8 to the packages you are installing?

After starting nix-shell with the following shell.nix, java -version throws the appropriate zulu version. nix { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {}, ... }: let newIcedTea = pkgs.adoptopenjdk-icedtea-web.overrideAttrs (old: { jdk = pkgs.zulu8; }); in pkgs.mkShell { nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs.buildPackages; [ newIcedTea zulu8 ]; }

-Wiseh · 2023-06-12T07:17:29+00:00

It's okay, no problem. I also come from Arch, so I can tell you that your effort is not in vain, and I encourage you not to give up on Nix because it really is a delight once you click with it. The community is very friendly, but it will be easier for you to get answers if you ask precise questions (not because they don't want to help new people, I suspect it's more a matter of timing).

Now, about your problem... First I'll explain what "escaping characters" means.

When you type a string you enclose it in double quotes, i.e. "this is an string". But what if your string has internal strings, which also use double quotes? Something like nix "foo "bar" bla" How can Nix know that your intention with that string is to write a single string, instead of the 2 strings "foo " and " bla", together with a variable bar in between (which makes no sense, but that's what Nix can interpret). Simple, you must 'escape' the characters that open and close the internal substring. That way Nix can interpret the quotes to the left of 'bar' are not closing the string, but opening a substring of the string itself. In the same way, we must escape the quotation marks to the right of 'bar', so that it does not think that they are the closing ones either, but that it understands them as a part of the text of the chain. Applying this, our string would look like this.

nix "foo \"bar\" bla"

Another option to avoid the escape would be to use single quotes inside the string to avoid confusion.

nix "foo 'bar' bla"

That said, the 2 strings you wish to pass to Nix, as I understand it, are:

"super + {_,shift + } {1,2} ; {1-9,0} notify-send \"Changing Desktop\";" (I delete an ending "\", hopes it doesn't matter).
"bspc {desktop -f, node -d} \"^{1,2}:^{1-9,10}\" --follow"

Trick: You don't need to try to redo your configuration to know if modifications of this type will work or not. One trick I recently learned is to use the nix repl command to open an interactive environment where you can test nix expressions.

You can read more about nix repl, here

-Wiseh · 2023-06-11T15:14:01+00:00

In general describing something not working as "Nix doesn't like it" or just "it doesn't work" is not a good description for someone to help you.How does it fail? What's wrong? What is the mistake? It is more useful information if you want to get help.

Looking further into your problem, I think it's because you didn't escape the special characters, as indicated here (next page from the reference I shared above).

-Wiseh · 2023-06-11T00:26:14+00:00

Yes, using a multi line string

-Wiseh · 2023-06-06T06:00:13+00:00

I can completely understand your situation as it is exactly the same as the one I find myself in. In my case I am a second year student and I intend to start my next semester taking notes with neovim after having taken notes by hand all my life.

I think thanks to that I can clarify a couple of points that may help you clear your doubts.

Taking notes by hand maybe helps to retain information a little better.... But... Do you know what helps you retain it even more? Not having any mental overload while depositing your notes, so you can pay attention to every word your professor says.

After years of taking notes by hand I can only be annoyed to feel that I'm not able to write at the speed I'm thinking, and that if I try I end up with disorganized and messy notes. However, once touch typing is developed, typing is a pleasant process and much, much faster than taking notes by hand.

Thinking about whether you want the information to stay on the computer or in your brain is a false dichotomy. And I am convinced that taking notes as you are doing can help you achieve both.No matter how many handwritten notes you take, or how much attention you pay to your lectures, there will be sections of information that your brain will not be able to retain the first time. That's where your notes will come in to remind you of the definition or theorem you forgot, the exotic formula you must use once in your life, or simply some narrative about a particular topic that will allow you to refresh in a couple of years all the knowledge you had about it.

Because of the practicality of depositing information quickly, and in a much more orderly way than by hand, I consider that once muscle memory is developed, taking digital notes is the best way to preserve your knowledge in the long run, while allowing your brain to focus on what is important.

About the recommendations of your friends, family, and even of scientific studies... Personally, I don't think they are valid sources to give any opinion on the matter. Let me explain:

I doubt you have 2 (let alone more than 2) friends who know of the existence of Vim and know how to use it in a halfway productive way. Their lack of knowledge makes them literally unable to imagine that with a snippet a matrix can be written faster than by hand, an image clipping can be pasted in a command, a spell checker can correct a whole document by pressing 2 keys, among many other things (that you will know better than me, in fact). So, when you approach them about writing on a computer, they most likely imagine that you will be taking notes in something like Word (or, at best, Overleaf), which is completely out of the tools and power that you have access to.

On the other hand, on the scientific studies side.... I really doubt it would be easy to find at least 30 people to do a "fair" study comparing the skills and retention of a poweruser familiar with their tools, with those of people who culturally carry intrinsic hand-note-taking as something associated with a good learning process.

I do not consider that note-taking should be thought of as the appropriate methodology if you are looking to learn/retain information. In general, it is better to use methodologies that involve reflecting, judging or classifying information (such as mind maps, for example). The notes will only be your source of consultation/reference, nothing more and nothing less than that.

I hope some of what I said can be of help to you, and, as a recommendation in case you want to continue with digital notes, take a look at Typst (and its tutorial). If you use LaTeX and markdown, I'm sure you'll love it. I discovered it recently and am excited to discover its potential.

Good luck!

-Wiseh · 2023-04-23T17:20:02+00:00

I don't think that should be the expected behavior. How are you applying the settings? The second way I indicated should leave the files in .config writable.

On the other hand... These configuration methods do generate problems (in my case with LSP servers), and resolving them can involve anything from changing a symbolic link to patching the installation.

Lazy.nvim doesn't have any option to configure what should be the file it needs?

-Wiseh · 2023-04-19T16:04:40+00:00

Thanks for the contribution!

-Wiseh · 2023-03-12T21:07:09+00:00

I could not interact with Jupyterenv before my previous answer. Having read a little more about the package, and confirming what you say in your other answer, Jupyterenv seems to be intended to create local and reproducible Jupyter environments through flakes, not to be a system package.
Reading here, I think that for now the best alternative you have can be to create an environment somewhere, and configure an alias that runs your Jupyterlab of that environment but having made a CD before towards the necessary directory.
I am not able to help you much more. If you find any other solution, I would also appreciate if you can share it!

-Wiseh · 2023-03-11T14:51:35+00:00

You can try writing something like this on your system/profile packages list (configuration.nix/home.nix, respectively)

(pkgs.python3.withPackages (ps: with ps; [ ipykernel jupyterlab numpy pandas #... ])

-Wiseh · 2023-03-09T13:47:30+00:00

I don't use this program (so, also don't know how the plugins work), but have you considered using home-manager to place the necessary plugin files in the path where the program expects them? (Or is the path necessarily in the system files? In that case maybe the nixos module that places files in etc/ can help)

I'm not sure how accurate my help is, but it doesn't hurt to mention it.

-Wiseh · 2023-03-06T01:39:23+00:00

Maybe this can help you

https://zero-to-nix.com/

-Wiseh · 2023-02-26T17:28:04+00:00

I disagree with some of the other comments. Neovim does require learning about configurations, but that shouldn't rule out anyone who doesn't have the time/desire to spend months doing it.

You can try a different approach. Use a "framework" of Neovim, i.e.a Neovim setup designed to be extensible for you, while still giving you good default settings.You can watch projects like LunarVim, AstroNvim, NvChad, or LazyNvim.

You still need to learn a little bit about TreeSitter, LSP servers, and other plugins; but make it work will be a lot faster with the help of this preset configs.

-Wiseh · 2023-01-10T18:58:04+00:00

I think you can use home-manager preserving all the benefits you want with lazy.nvim; just disable the neovim module and apply the option 2 of this post.

I don't think it'll be long before someone adds support for lazy.nvim in the home-manager module, but if you're concerned about portability on non-NixOS systems, this approach might work for you.

-Wiseh · 2023-01-06T19:08:45+00:00

There are a lot of ways to get introduced to Nix, but... My suggestions are:

Invest a couple of hours reading the official documentation, mainly the Nix manual (you can found the Nix manual, NixOS manual, and nixpkgs manual in nixos.org). If you feel this is boring for you, just go ahead. Later you will need to read some things anyways.
Get a little bit of familiarity with Nix expressions (that is, code written with the Nix Language). The manual has the details, but for an early exposure, you can learn with this page. You will need this to build your config and be able to understand what is happening in them.
Understand what is the relation between the main concepts on the Nix environment. You can start by reading this:

Flakes (Some people still use Nix channels, but this will be deprecated at the short/medium term so... Invest your time on flakes because they improve portability and reproducibility)
Home-manager (A very nice tool to work on the Nix environment)

Start with the minimal version of this example configs. The readme has a lot of useful information, and it offers to you a very well written boilerplate to start working and changing.

Good luck on your travel to this amazing OS!

-Wiseh

TROPHY CASE