Software Collections¶
tuinix ships a lean base system and lets you opt into curated
collections during installation. Every collection is a NixOS module, so
you can also enable or disable them later by editing
/etc/tuinix/hosts/<hostname>/default.nix and running
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake /etc/tuinix#<hostname>.
Finding your apps: the tuinix menu¶
Terminal apps can be hard to discover, so every tuinix system includes
tuinix-menu — a gum-powered launcher with drill-down categories
(files, monitoring, editors, network, communication, games, sound and
music, utilities, and more). Only apps that are actually installed are
shown, so the menu adapts to the collections you selected.
The Utilities category includes a screen-brightness picker
(brightnessctl under the hood) — handy on laptops.
Base system (always installed)¶
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| vim, git, curl, wget, htop, tree, tmux | Core terminal tools |
yazi |
Default file manager — just type f |
wiremix |
PipeWire mixer TUI — the default sound application |
bluetui |
Bluetooth management TUI |
brightnessctl |
Screen backlight control |
tuinix-menu |
The drill-down app launcher |
The base system also enables PipeWire (with ALSA and PulseAudio shims) and Bluetooth.
Optional collections¶
TUI productivity suite¶
Terminal apps for daily work: neovim, helix, lazygit, btop, w3m, starship, atuin, zellij, yazi extras, plus messaging clients — nchat (Telegram/WhatsApp), iamb (Matrix), scli (Signal) and aerc (email).
Pentest tools¶
Security auditing: aircrack-ng, nmap, metasploit, termshark, hashcat, sqlmap.
Terminal games¶
Roguelikes, puzzles, arcade classics and text adventures: angband, crawl, cataclysm-dda, vitetris, nudoku, frotz, bsdgames and more.
Sound and Music¶
A console-only music creation studio:
tuinix-music-menu— gum menu for the whole studio- Elevator music generators (simple and enhanced polyphonic)
- MIDI composition (
generate_midi.pyvia the menu) with a compose → render (FluidSynth) → master (sox) workflow - Terminal live-coding tools: csound, chuck, orca
- abcmidi, timidity, ffmpeg, sox, lame
Generated audio is written to ~/Music. GUI music tools are
deliberately excluded to keep with the TUI theme.
Emergency GUI¶
For those emergencies when you absolutely must have a GUI:
This starts the cage Wayland compositor in kiosk mode running only the Brave browser. Privacy is part of the design:
- Brave runs in incognito with its profile on a tmpfs — nothing is written to your ZFS datasets, so snapshots keep no browsing audit trail.
- Brave runs inside a bubblewrap sandbox: your home folders are replaced with an empty tmpfs and are never visible to the browser. Only the Nix store, DNS/TLS configuration, fonts and the GPU are exposed.
Close the browser to return to the console; everything the session wrote evaporates.
WiFi on the live installer ISO¶
The live installer environment uses
impala, a WiFi TUI backed by
iwd. Run impala, pick your network, and DHCP is handled
automatically. (iwctl is available too.) Installed systems use
NetworkManager with nmtui as before.