Note: Nix 2.0 contains a new nix search command which supports caching. You may want to use that instead of nixfd!

nixfd

Quick and dirty tool to cache and search through the Nix package/derivation database.

Every NixOS user is probably painfully aware that nix-env -qaP is incredibly slow, but it's also something that ends up getting called quite often.

As a workaround, simply cargo install this repository and never worry again!

$ nixfd emacs
nixos.emacs                                                             emacs-25.3
nixos.emacs-all-the-icons-fonts                                         emacs-all-the-icons-fonts-3.1.1
nixos.emacs25-nox                                                       emacs-nox-25.3
nixos.python27Packages.ropemacs                                         python2.7-ropemacs-0.7
nixos.python36Packages.ropemacs                                         python3.6-ropemacs-0.7

The package cache is in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/nixpkgs (usually defaults to ~/.cache/nixpkgs). The file is refreshed once it is more than 12 hours old.

Note: Assumes you use Nix and have ripgrep installed.

tazjin/nixfd

nixfd