Fixing macos spotlight and alfred indexing of home manager apps.

README.md

I spent two days on this, because I did not want to:

1. Copy the apps
2. Use trampolines.
3. Aliases (because they do not show up as applications).
4. Wrapper scripts (because I got weird rosetta prompts).

The issues seems to be the symlinks.

What worked for me was a hybrid approach. I copy the Info.plist and the icon and symlink the rest.

Claude.ai was friendly enough to give me some code for this that worked (modulo some manual fixes).

home.nix

{ pkgs, config, lib, ... }:

{
  imports = [
    ./macos-apps-fix.nix
  ];
}

macos-apps-fix.nix

{ pkgs, config, lib, ... }:

{
    # Need to copy the apps because otherwise spotlight does not find them.
  home.activation = {
    copyNixApps = lib.hm.dag.entryAfter ["linkGeneration"] ''
        # Create directory for the applications
        mkdir -p "$HOME/Applications/Nix-Apps"

        # Remove old entries
        rm -rf "$HOME/Applications/Nix-Apps"/*

        # Get the target of the symlink
        NIXAPPS=$(readlink -f "$HOME/.nix-profile/Applications")

        # For each application
        for app_source in "$NIXAPPS"/*; do
          if [ -d "$app_source" ] || [ -L "$app_source" ]; then
              appname=$(basename "$app_source")
              target="$HOME/Applications/Nix-Apps/$appname"
              
              # Create the basic structure
              mkdir -p "$target"
              mkdir -p "$target/Contents"
              
              # Copy the Info.plist file
              if [ -f "$app_source/Contents/Info.plist" ]; then
                mkdir -p "$target/Contents"
                cp -f "$app_source/Contents/Info.plist" "$target/Contents/"
              fi
              
              # Copy icon files
              if [ -d "$app_source/Contents/Resources" ]; then
                mkdir -p "$target/Contents/Resources"
                find "$app_source/Contents/Resources" -name "*.icns" -exec cp -f {} "$target/Contents/Resources/" \;
              fi
              
              # Symlink the MacOS directory (contains the actual binary)
              if [ -d "$app_source/Contents/MacOS" ]; then
                ln -sfn "$app_source/Contents/MacOS" "$target/Contents/MacOS"
              fi
              
              # Symlink other directories
              for dir in "$app_source/Contents"/*; do
                dirname=$(basename "$dir")
                if [ "$dirname" != "Info.plist" ] && [ "$dirname" != "Resources" ] && [ "$dirname" != "MacOS" ]; then
                  ln -sfn "$dir" "$target/Contents/$dirname"
                fi
              done
            fi
            done
    '';
  };
}