| 8 May 2026 |
 ibizaman | * Hello all, I was wondering if there was some work on making nix documentation executable? In my project I extensively use nmd to build the documentation but what I see missing is that I can’t test the examples and snippets I’m writing and they inevitably become stale. I did some light research on this but didn’t find anything. | 15:27:12 |
| ibizaman | FWIW I looked at existing literate programming tools but they are all so verbose. And they somehow don’t support markdown files for the major part. I thought I’d just roll my own parser using some markdown lib to just concatenate all source code but I’d like for others to be able to use it instead of this sitting in my own repo. | 16:06:07 |
| 11 May 2026 |
 Christian Friedow | The only thing that comes to my mind is https://ngi.nixos.org/. They provide executable examples that spin up VMs. But I guess what you are talking about is more like small code snippets that you can execute in a browser.
What project are you working on? And where are you rendering documentation to (man pages, documentation website, help flags in cli tools or code)? | 07:29:29 |
 fricklerhandwerk | In reply to @ibizaman:matrix.org
Hello all, I was wondering if there was some work on making nix documentation executable? In my project I extensively use nmd to build the documentation but what I see missing is that I can’t test the examples and snippets I’m writing and they inevitably become stale. I did some light research on this but didn’t find anything. The most generic — and indeed language-agnostic — tool for this is noweb. It’s extremely simple and thanks to Nix-based workflows, easy to control. There’s also modern variants that convert the block annotations to something other than TeX, and the mechanism is so simple one can implement any custom format on a whim. | 09:42:58 |
 figsoda | u might also be able to run some nix implementation in wasm like snix | 17:09:43 |
 hsjobeki | unified js let's you build whatever you want for markdown.
If it's a web page it uses JavaScript anyways.
Remark, rehype plugins are the both tools that I would use to build this myself. Noweb has some benefits but it seems pretty niche. Unified.js is the defacto standard in frontend for processing markdown. (Afaik)
If it's just for evaluation you can call snix as mentioned via wasm directly in the browser. | 17:20:21 |
| hsjobeki | * unified js let's you build whatever you want for markdown.
If it's a web page it uses JavaScript anyways.
Remark, rehype plugins are the both tools that I would use to build this myself. Noweb has some benefits but it seems pretty niche. Unified.js is the defacto standard in frontend for processing markdown. (Afaik)
For evaluation you can call snix as mentioned via wasm directly in the browser. For more than that you might need a backend | 17:21:16 |
| hsjobeki | Or is it a local cli thingy | 17:23:51 |
