Ever wondered how “nix develop” works? What kind of arcane horrors make our reproducible developer environments work? In this talk we’ll begin by explaining how “nix develop” works, then we’ll use that understanding to explore what it looks like to create an improved devshell experience, including improved startup times, extension to shells other than Bash, and adding packages without needing to exit and re-enter the shell. Along the way we’ll discuss some of the cursed idiosyncrasies of different shells, and some of the patterns for working around them. In the end we’ll all need therapy, but we’ll know more about how our shells are conspiring against us and why we should all be using Fish.

about this event: https://talks.nixcon.org/nixcon-2025/talk/MAEMPM/