I was wondering if there would be any issues with installing Nix and Homebrew on the same system?
I know Homebrew tends to install things all over different directories, but from what I have read, Nix is very clean. If I understand this correctly, Nix installs it's packages all within one single directory.
So if this is the case, could I try running them both side-by-side? I would be careful not to install too many of the same packages from both places in (ie. I wouldn't install grep, htop, or whatever else from both Homebrew and Nix and if I did I would take precautions).
Side-note: This would not be permanent. I am thinking about switching from Homebrew to Nix (just to mix things up a bit), and I wanted to try Nix on my main machine before taking the leap (if at all). I know I could just try Nix on a VM, but I would not get the same experience unless I tried it on my main system. So it would be nice to install it along Homebrew and give it a shot before going through the pains of removing Homebrew and replacing all my Homebrew packages with Nix packages.
Yes, you can install Nix along side Homebrew.
Nix will install all its packages within /nix/store For example, on my NixOS system vim is currently installed in /nix/store/j6nrk9h1rpxrzmccm0yq520ik625gd1q-vim-8.1.0578
Your shell will choose whether to use a package from Nix or Homebrew, according to how $PATH is set up. For example, if it so happens that the Nix paths are first, then they will take precedence.
A common source of confusion is that install means something different on Nix. When you install a package, such as Python, it becomes part of a Nix environment, and as such can be executed without specifying the full path; Just as you'd expect from any package manager.
However, if you install a package which has, say, Python, as a dependency, Python would get installed, but more likely than not it would not be included in the environment. Hence it can only be executed via the absolute path.
On a related note, due to a similar reason, if you install a library with Nix and then try to compile against it outside of Nix, it will not work; The build tools will not find the library.