Enabling the extension once installed in NixOS

[offray]

Hi all.

First of anything, thanks for PaperWM. I'm a recently expat to NixOS and PaperWM coming after years long usage of Arch/Manjaro + AwesomeWM, with great respect for the communities behind those projects and a lot of muscle memory from my previous toolbox, but looking for improved reproducibility across my home/work and desktop/laptop machines. So far, enjoying the NixOS experience, despite not being yet my daily driver until I get a "similar enough" workflow to my previous setup.

This is where PaperWM fits, as I like the idea of scrolling tiling window managers even more that the non-scrolling ones as far as my new experience with PaperWM shows. But, as a newbie with both Gnome and NixOS, I have a, maybe silly, issue and it is that, once PaperWM is installed declaratively in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix I don't know how to enable it (I thought I would be enabled by default). The only way of installing and enabling PaperWM in a single step, was to make this via a Gnome extension installed from the web browser. But then, I'm loosing the declarative aspect of NixOS. I imagine that something similar to the thing I have to install and enable fish as my default shell exists for PaperWM, but I can't find any documentation:

# ...
programs.fish.enable = true;
# ...
  users.users.myuser = {
    # ...
    shell = pkgs.fish; # See tthe corresponding line in the enabling programs
    packages = with pkgs; [
    #  thunderbird
    ];
  };

There is something like that that I'm missing? How can I help to improve the documentation so other distro + Tiling Window Manager expats like my can find their new home in PaperWM + NixOS?

Thanks in advance,

[terlar]

If you want the package to be enabled you need to manage it with Home Manager as well, this can be done as such:

# ...
programs.gnome-shell = {
  enable = true;
  extensions = [
    { package = pkgs.gnome47Extensions."[email protected]"; }
    # or
    # { package = pkgs.gnomeExtensions.paperwm; }

  ];
}

[terlar]

You can also configure PaperWM itself via dconf.settings under key "org/gnome/shell/extensions/paperwm" and "org/gnome/shell/extensions/paperwm/keybindings".

See for example https://github.com/terlar/nix-config/blob/main/modules/home/profiles/user/terje/desktop/gnome/default.nix#L102

[offray]

Thanks a lot @terlar . I'll look more into Home Manager to make this setup declarative. I'll let you know once I test it.

[Thesola10]

You can have a look at how the test VM does it.