How To Theme & Use ZaneyOS

Table of Contents

ZaneyOS 2.3 Docs - This article is part of a series.

Part 1: My NixOS Configuration: ZaneyOS Explained

Part 3: This Article

Inside the hosts/<your-hostname>/system.nix file you will see a section beginning with stylix. This section includes a line that references an image in the flake. Stylix needs an image no matter what and it will use it to generate a color scheme for the system.

If you would like to define your color scheme you can uncomment the lines below the image line and those settings will override the image setting.

📔 How To Use ZaneyOS #

I have some very useful aliases that are available to you after switching to the flake.

🐊 Update The Flakes Inputs & Packages #

This runs a nix flake update on the flake directory. You probably shouldn’t run this. This updates all packages and the lock file in the ZaneyOS flake. Only do this if you need to and know you need to, running this command opens you up to breaking changes.

Runs a rebuild switch --flake on the flake directory. Used for updating the system after you have made changes to some of the files. This assumes you keep the zaneyos folder/repo in your home dir.

This removes all other generations other than the current. Great for cleaning up the system if you have been rebuilding and making changes a lot recently.

This will pull down the latest stable install script from the zaneyos repo and run it. The install script also functions as an update script where it backups your current config to .config/zaneyos-backups and then installs the new version.

For most system maintenance this is all that is required.

The cat command has been aliased to bat which makes life awesome when you want to quickly check a file. I have also added a few interesting terminal easter eggs that are pretty neat.

📦 Adding & Installing Extra Packages #

You can find the place to put packages to be installed for your user specifically at hosts/<your-hostname>/users.nix and for the system packages it’s the hosts/<your-hostname>/config.nix file.

You MUST use the proper NixOS package names.

Visit the NixOS Packages page to search for the application you want. It is a good idea to check the NixOS Options at the top of that page as well for the package your searching for.

If the package you are installing needs extra configuration there is a decent chance there is a way of installing it, (enable = true;), through NixOS options or Home Manager.

🤯 Variables #

In your host specific folder you will find the variables.nix file. This is where you can set variables that are used other places in the configuration.

option	description
gitUsername	Set username for Git, similar to `git config --global user.name "<your-username>"`.
gitEmail	The email you use for your Git account.
extraMonitorSettings	Add “monitor=” hyprland lines to hyprland config for host specific monitor settings.
clock24h	Enable the time for different utilities to be presented in 24 hour format.
browser	The name of the browser do you want installed and used by default. The package name too, for ones like google-chrome where the binary is google-chrome-stable this is solved for you. So it would just be google-chrome.
terminal	Name of the binary for your terminal of choice. Example: “kitty” or “alacritty”.
keyboardLayout	Set the keyboard layout, defaults to “us”
consoleKeyMap	Set the console layout, defaults to “us”