SUsunaookami·Aug 2, 2026
Also incredibly useful with "comma" so Claude can directly use tools that are not installed yet or only one-off: https://github.com/nix-community/comma
In Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Sparknix-community
comma
Rust2020–2026
nix-community / comma
comma
Comma runs software without installing it. [maintainers=@Artturin,@burke,@DavHau]
11Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Comma runs software without installing it. [maintainers=@Artturin,@burke,@DavHau]
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-11-08 14:25:05 UTC to 2026-08-02 22:20:45 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
What Hacker News says
11 sourcesBecause it's "a proper language" [1]. Not to mention webscale!
It does seem to do some more complex stuff now that would've been annoying, but not impossible, to write as a shell script.
[1]: https://github.com/nix-community/comma/pull/19
In Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)If you think nix-shell is cool, try out comma. https://github.com/nix-community/comma
When there's some random little utility I need I don't always bother to install it. It's just `, weirdlittleutil`.
In Fun with uv and PEP 723Thought this was going to be about Comma [0]
0: https://github.com/nix-community/comma
In Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)Nice. There's also "comma" (https://github.com/nix-community/comma) that allows running any executable from nixpkgs by prepending ",".
In Nix-shell shebang: run any script with arbitrary packages, self-containedRelatedly, check out comma. It's basically a shortcut prefix command that will search packages for the binary you want to run (via nix-index), and gives you an interactive choice if there are multiple. Which package was drill in again? No matter, I'll just prefix a comma :)
https://github.com/nix-community/comma
In Nix journey part 0: Learning and reference materialsThis brought https://github.com/Shopify/comma to mind
In Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)Comma lets you run all Nix packages (more than 80000) quickly "without installation". It is basically a wrapper around `nix run` though. Honestly, `nix run` and `nix shell` help you become adventurous removing your fear of breaking things.
https://github.com/nix-community/comma
In Show HN: Dockerized – Run CLI tools without installationThis is a good overview of NixOS however it's very limited and barely scratches the surface of what Nix can do. I consider it a complete replacement for the "reproducible environment" problem that some programming languages solve (e.g. Python's virtualenv, Haskell's cabal repl), among others.
A simple example of this is when I want to run a Python script from the internet, I can execute
nix-shell --run "python3 foo.py" -p "python3.withPackages (ps: with ps; [ numpy ])"
and now I'm in a shell where numpy is avaliable to the Python 3 interpreter. Or I could test the Haskell QuickCheck library and run
nix-shell --run "ghci" -p "haskellPackages.ghcWithPackages (ps: with ps; [ QuickCheck ])"
See[0] for a way to run programs without even installing them by prefixing them with a comma, e.g. `, hello`. Or what about running any Linux ELF
Read the rest
binary by automatically getting their shared dependencies at runtime[1]? Or generating bootable ISOs from your NixOS configuration[2], cross-compiling with little effort[3], and so on.
These problems have already been solved to varying degrees in other places, but Nix lets you unify them (think of the huge amounts of libraries downloaded by cargo, cabal, node and so on scattered amongst projects and your home folder, Nix stores everything in /nix/store/) into a single framework.
I'd like to also say that the Nixpkgs repository[4] is super easy to contribute to, just open a PR on GitHub as opposed to sending patches via mailing lists, which is checked via the CI. I'm not sure if there's something analogous on other package repositories but there's also a bot[5] that opens thousands of PRs updating and testing packages automatically.
[0] https://github.com/Shopify/comma
[1] https://github.com/Lassulus/nix-autobahn
[2] https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators
[3] https://matthewbauer.us/blog/beginners-guide-to-cross.html
[4] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/
[5] https://github.com/r-ryantm