For anyone else reading this comment who was confused because this seems like the opposite of what you'd expect about Nix: Hacker News ate the asterisks and turned them into italics.

use a backslash. \*

(had to use a double backslash to render that correctly)

Or two consecutive asterisks: ** becomes *

Besides many nix computers I also have wife, dog, children, chores, shopping to be done. Unlike when I was young engineer I could stay all night fiddling with bash scripts and environments.

What does your wife, dog, children, chores, and shopping have to do with custom configuration and scripts? Just set up a Git repo online, put your files there, and take a couple of minutes to improve it incrementally when you encounter inconveniences. And just like that, you made your life easier for a marginal effort.

They compete for time.

Don't even try to explain the scripts to wife*, try the dog. At least he'll understand it just as much and be enthusiastic to hear it!

*may not be applicable to all wives, ymmv.

I thought my wife latex, she loves me for it :D

I'm saying that makes no sense, as I've wrote in the comment you're replying to.

Having a wife increases the opportunity costs of the time you spend on maintaining the scripts and also increases the costs while writing these (when the wife is nagging).

I don't get why this is a problem. Just stick all your configs in a git repo and clone it wherever you need it.

I run two OSes. So two variants.

Some are desktops, some laptops, some servers. Different packages installed, different hardware. Three more variants.

Yes, I do have a script to set up my environment, but it already has a lot of conditional behavior to handle these five total variants. And I don't want to have to re-test the scripts and re-sync often.