Mac Application launchers not symlinked on darwin

[starcraft66]

Issue description

I noticed that when I install an application on macOS that includes a GUI launcher (emacs in my case) using nix-darwin, Emacs.app is symlinked into ~/Applications/Nix Apps so that things like Spotlight can find and launch Emacs without requiring me to have a dedicated terminal open to start emacs.

I think home-manager should adopt this behaviour and symlink its apps into ~/Applications/Home Manager Apps or something like that to greatly improve the experience of launching GUI apps on macOS/darwin.

Meta

Not sure what other useful information to add, this is more of a feature request than a bug.

[starcraft66]

I should add that applications are already symlinked into ~/.nix-profile/Applications by nix-env(?) but this is not enough for them to be picked up by Spotlight. nix-darwin goes a step further by linking these apps into ~/Applications where Spotlight does search for apps.

https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/system/applications.nix

[berbiche]

Here's what I added to my configuration to make this work

EDIT : the example has been further simplified

{
  # Install MacOS applications to the user environment if the targetPlatform is Darwin
  home.file."Applications/home-manager".source = let
  apps = pkgs.buildEnv {
    name = "home-manager-applications";
    paths = config.home.packages;
    pathsToLink = "/Applications";
  };
  in mkIf pkgs.stdenv.targetPlatform.isDarwin "${apps}/Applications";
}

[berbiche]

This task is now handled in my PR #1460

[jwiegley]

I'm seeing a conflict between the above code and nix-darwin:

Creating home file links in /Users/johnw
ln: failed to create symbolic link '/Users/johnw/Applications/Home Manager Apps': Permission denied

This is because ~/Applications is a symlink into my Nix store that cannot be modified, while it looks like home-manager is trying to make a new directory directly within ~/Applications.

[berbiche]

You are right. The logic in nix-darwin to symlink applications to ~/Applications is here.

if [ ! -e ~/Applications -o -L ~/Applications ]; then
    ln -sfn ${cfg.build.applications}/Applications ~/Applications
elif [ ! -e ~/Applications/Nix\ Apps -o -L ~/Applications/Nix\ Apps ]; then
    ln -sfn ${cfg.build.applications}/Applications ~/Applications/Nix\ Apps
else
    echo "warning: ~/Applications and ~/Applications/Nix Apps are directories, skipping App linking..." >&2
fi

AFAIK there are many applications that create folders within ~/Applications so nix-darwin's logic seems wrong.
The first if should be removed altogether.

Maybe @LnL7 could provide more input?

[rycee]

@jwiegley Is it nix-darwin that takes ~/Applications or something else? I don't know macOS so I assumed that ~/Applications is a pre-existing directory for all users. I guess that assumption is wrong? Should I revert the d3aee54 commit?

[berbiche]

On a brand new Mac ~/Applications already existed in my case

[rycee]

I've disabled the feature in the above commit until we've come to an agreement with nix-darwin 🙂

[Atemu]

I don't see a reason why this should also be disabled for Darwin users who don't use nix-darwin, could you make it an option instead?

[nuance]

I might have something unusual about my setup, but I've found that symlinks don't get picked up by spotlight, so symlinking the app dir (or the individual apps) don't cause them to show up in my spotlight search (eg cmd-space + "emacs" only shows web results).

After some debugging, I found that spotlight ignores symlinks but will index aliases. Aliases are kind of awful to work with - you can't seem to create them from the CLI without pinging finder via AppleScript / osascript.

I've added the following to my config which seems to make things work:

  home.activation = {
    aliasApplications = lib.hm.dag.entryAfter [ "writeBoundary" ] ''
      app_folder=$(echo ~/Applications);
      for app in $(find "$genProfilePath/home-path/Applications" -type l); do
        $DRY_RUN_CMD rm -f $app_folder/$(basename $app)
        $DRY_RUN_CMD osascript -e "tell app \"Finder\"" -e "make new alias file at POSIX file \"$app_folder\" to POSIX file \"$app\"" -e "set name of result to \"$(basename $app)\"" -e "end tell"
      done
    '';
  };

(in the context of my dot files: https://github.com/nuance/dotfiles/blob/master/nix/environments/macos.nix#L11-L19)

Happy to make a PR for this or let someone else use this code if it looks reasonable.