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marchyo

Workstation Template

Marchyo includes a workstation template that provides a complete developer setup with desktop environment, development tools, and sensible defaults.

Getting started

Section titled “Getting started”

1. Initialize the template

Section titled “1. Initialize the template”
Terminal window
nix flake init -t github:Jylhis/marchyo#workstation

2. Generate hardware configuration

Section titled “2. Generate hardware configuration”
Terminal window
nixos-generate-config --show-hardware-config > hardware-configuration.nix

3. Customize configuration.nix

Section titled “3. Customize configuration.nix”

Edit the generated configuration:

  • Change networking.hostName to your workstation name
  • Update marchyo.users.developer with your details
  • Set marchyo.timezone / marchyo.defaultLocale if the defaults (Europe/Zurich, en_US.UTF-8) don’t fit
  • Development tooling is a single switch — set marchyo.development.enable = false if you don’t want it

4. Test in a VM (optional)

Section titled “4. Test in a VM (optional)”
Terminal window
nixos-rebuild build-vm --flake .#workstation
./result/bin/run-workstation-vm

5. Build and switch

Section titled “5. Build and switch”
Terminal window
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#workstation

What’s included

Section titled “What’s included”

Desktop environment

Section titled “Desktop environment”
  • Hyprland (Wayland compositor) with all Marchyo customizations
  • Ghostty terminal

Development tools

Section titled “Development tools”
  • Editors — Emacs by default; switch via marchyo.defaults.editor (emacs, vscode, vscodium, zed) and marchyo.defaults.terminalEditor (emacs, neovim, helix, nano)
  • Version control — Git with Git LFS, GitHub CLI
  • Containers — rootless Podman with a docker compatibility shim, buildah, skopeo
  • Virtualization — QEMU/KVM via libvirtd
  • Build & debug — gnumake, cmake, gcc, jq/yq, nmap, tcpdump

Terminal enhancements

Section titled “Terminal enhancements”
  • Starship prompt
  • Zoxide (smart cd)
  • fzf (fuzzy finder)
  • ripgrep (fast grep)
  • fd (fast find)

Customization tips

Section titled “Customization tips”

Adding programming languages

Section titled “Adding programming languages”
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  python3
  nodejs
  rustc cargo
  go
  jdk17
];

VS Code extensions

Section titled “VS Code extensions”
programs.vscode = {
  enable = true;
  extensions = with pkgs.vscode-extensions; [
    ms-python.python
    rust-lang.rust-analyzer
  ];
};

Using Docker instead of Podman

Section titled “Using Docker instead of Podman”
marchyo.development.containers.backend = "docker";

See Feature Flags for the docker group trade-off.

Project-specific dev shells with direnv

Section titled “Project-specific dev shells with direnv”

marchyo.development.enable already installs direnv with nix-direnv. In your project directory, create a .envrc:

Terminal window
use flake

Multi-monitor setup

Section titled “Multi-monitor setup”

Describe your outputs in marchyo.monitors (see Monitors):

marchyo.monitors = [
  { output = "DP-1"; mode = "1920x1080@60"; position = "0x0"; }
  { output = "HDMI-A-1"; mode = "1920x1080@60"; position = "1920x0"; }
];

Extra environment variables

Section titled “Extra environment variables”

env entries must use the two-argument form. The legacy hyprlang shape ({ n = ...; v = ...; }) renders as a single-table call that aborts Hyprland’s config load, so Marchyo rejects it at eval time:

wayland.windowManager.hyprland.settings.env = [
  { _args = [ "HYPRCURSOR_THEME" "Bibata-Modern-Classic" ]; }
];

Updating

Section titled “Updating”
Terminal window
nix flake update
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#workstation