Hover - Home overlay

Tired of programs you don't even intend on keeping vomiting all over your home directory? Frequent user of cd $(mktemp -d)? Read on.

Intro

Hover creates an overlay directory for your $HOME. The files in your original $HOME are all there, but any changes such as modifying, adding or removing files are lost after exiting Hover.

Installation

Hover is distributed as a Nix flake.

Install it into your profile:

$ nix profile install github:max-privatevoid/hover

Try it in a temporary shell (it won't create any files in your home directory, promise)

$ nix shell github:max-privatevoid/hover

To be able to use this utiliy as non-root, user_allow_other must be added to /etc/fuse.conf.

On NixOS this can be done using the option programs.fuse.userAllowOther = true.

Usage

Hover has a couple of subcommands, listed here.

If you are anywhere inside your home directory when executing Hover, you will automatically be cd'd to the same place within the overlay.

hover shell

Runs your $SHELL in a Hover environment. Can also be used by running hover with no arguments.

hover run

Runs the specified program, as shown in the example below. Keep in mind that environment variables on the command line are parsed by the outer shell, so hover run echo $HOME will echo your regular home directory.

$ hover run printenv HOME
/tmp/tmp.oqwgw6BpC7/home
hover: cleaning up
hover: space consumed by temporary home directory:
      0  B /tmp/tmp.oqwgw6BpC7/.upper

hover nix

A convenient shortcut for hover run nix, so you can do:

$ hover nix shell github:some-person/tool-you-want-to-test

Modules

Hover also provides two modules:

• nixosModules.default which adds hover to the system packages and enables programs.fuse.userAllowOthers.
• homeManagerModules.starship which adds integration with the starship prompt.