| 15 Nov 2025 |
 Katie | I don't know how convincing it will be to you, but I can try to offer my perspective there on the appeal for me | 18:48:38 |
| Katie | I have... god only knows what kind of dyslexia-adjacent cognitive bullshit going on in addition to my really crappy vision. RegEx literals being their own unique semantic construct unto themselves that IDEs can differentiate and color/highlight as such is a HUGE benefit to me. I'm loathe to praise JavaScript for almost anything, but RE literals are a huge win for me there that I really miss when writing say, Rust. I find Nix Path Literals exceptionally ergonomic for very similar reasons. It just helps me see and understand much more clearly what I'm looking at, vs. just another string | 18:53:25 |
| Katie |
| 18:54:10 |
| Katie | * plus shorter is nice too | 18:54:16 |
| Katie | at the risk of sounding naively optimistic, I imagine their must be some happy path to deliver the benefits sans footguns | 18:55:40 |
 522 it/its ⛯ΘΔ | usage aware highlighting (if this is used inside a builtins.match / passed to something that takes a regex(not that nix really has a type system that'd make that easy to determine)) would also help that | 18:56:32 |
 aloisw | I feel like highlighting the first argument of builtins.match will get you 90% of the way for the thing you have mentioned. | 18:56:33 |
| 522 it/its ⛯ΘΔ | without needing language changes | 18:56:36 |
| 522 it/its ⛯ΘΔ | treesitter can do some level of that (things passed to writeShellApplication are highlighted as bash) | 18:57:37 |
| 522 it/its ⛯ΘΔ | 
Download image.png | 18:58:39 |
| 522 it/its ⛯ΘΔ | plus this to manually specify the language, though that's quite verbose for single line things | 18:58:56 |
| Katie | this is true | 18:59:09 |
| Katie | What I would give to at least be able to put that syntax comment inside the string (though I understand why that's not feasible) | 19:00:07 |
 P | Katie: I'm totally in the same boat RE: there is a huge benefit in having syntax awareness for constructs like RE inside a string. For me the moment was when I used JetBrains stuff with Kubernetes Helm charts for the first time. Game changer. But like 522 it/its ⛯ΘΔ already said, luckily, tree sitter is pretty good at nesting our Syntaxes. 🎉🥳
Now we just have to ensure it recognizes that automatically every time in all relevant cases. How hard can that be 🫠
| 19:05:27 |
| aloisw | One problem with adding stuff to the Nix language (whether regex literals or string distinguishers) is that the syntax is already extremely crowded due to questionable decisions of the past | 19:07:39 |
| Katie | yeah... | 19:23:55 |
| Katie | I do hear that | 19:23:59 |
 tc424 (Steve D) | I for one welcome this first step on the road to merging nix and perl syntax | 20:35:33 |
 antifuchs | if syntax highlighting is a concern, tree-sitter-nix can already recognize strings marked | 22:55:50 |
| antifuchs | * if syntax highlighting is a concern, tree-sitter-nix can already recognize strings marked with /* bash */ and other markers... | 22:56:17 |
| 16 Nov 2025 |
 KFears (burnt out) | In reply to @522_:catgirl.cloud
treesitter can do some level of that (things passed to writeShellApplication are highlighted as bash) Damn, TIL | 00:22:54 |
| antifuchs | It’s such a neat feature (also apologies for repeating that same thing you said earlier there) | 01:25:28 |
 hexa | injections is what that feature is called iirc | 01:34:36 |
 piegames | In reply to @347online:matrix.org
What I would give to at least be able to put that syntax comment inside the string (though I understand why that's not feasible) This will hopefully happen, eventually | 07:04:05 |
| piegames | In reply to @347online:matrix.org
Hello. I have a question about prior art in Nix language RFCs/pre-RFCs of if anyone had anyone had ever proposed something along the lines of Regex Literals?
Considering that the Lix project is interested in evolving the language[1][2], I figured this might be a good place to ask?
(Wasn't sure if this moreso belonged here or in Development)
This would be nice to have, but the pile of things that need cleanup first it daunting | 07:05:19 |
| piegames | In an ideal world, we'd get dedicated custom string types with sanity checking and user-defined in pure Nix via macro-like features. In this world, be happy if we get annotated string types so that you can run a linter on it | 07:07:02 |
 Sofie 🏳️⚧️ (she/her) | Redacted or Malformed Event | 16:02:31 |
| Sofie 🏳️⚧️ (she/her) | Redacted or Malformed Event | 16:03:45 |
 neindochoh! / Seti (they/them) | thanks for sharing this hint! :) this makes things like neovim configuration inside nix files soo much more readable for me. | 18:17:26 |
 Emma [it/its] | Q: is there a way to check if all outputs in a flake actually build? | 19:15:40 |
