There’s this program on nix that lets you type a comma, then any application name that exists anywhere in the Nix repos. It then downloads that app and runs it once, without “installing” it. Sometimes I find myself running something dozens of times this way before I realize it should probably be in my config.
https://github.com/nix-community/comma
I'm not sure I'll ever understand why they replaced their working ~50 line shell script with a Rust program that just shells out to the same nix-* commands. I appreciate that there are some safety benefits, but that program is just not complex enough to benefit.
Because it's "a proper language" [1]. Not to mention webscale!
It does seem to do some more complex stuff now that would've been annoying, but not impossible, to write as a shell script.
[1]: https://github.com/nix-community/comma/pull/19
Shell is already memory safe, so there's not even "we replaced C" to lean on.