search.nixos.org also includes flakes that people PR into the index via GitHub at https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-search/issues

ps: $ nix search exists via experimental flags https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3...

It does though. `nix search`.

This exists and searches `search.nixos.org` for a few reasons:

- you may want to search without downloading and indexing nixpkgs and the hydra results yourself

- you may want to search by the name of the binaries/programs that will be installed, which is impossible to do by looking through a local package store alone

- you may want the search to be fast

- you may want to search from the command line

`nix search` is a cruel joke which doesn't allow searching by the name/program that would be installed, only package name, and requires a flake name every time. Absolutely terrible interface.

My tool is a single-install binary that performs fast and accurate search to help you find the right package name to install a given binary. I don't understand how after years of using other package managers anyone could want a search tool that does anything other than this by default.

For more details on why this exists, check out https://github.com/peterldowns/nix-search-cli#motivation

Nix has several search commands, it's just none of them do quite what people want (e.g. "nix search" with flakes and "nix-query" without flakes search by name and description, "nix-locate" can search by contents but the interface is a bit obtuse)

For those who want a local search for executables, and don't mind running nix-index:

    #!/bin/sh
    results="$(nix-locate -1 --regex --top-level "^/bin/${1}\$")"
    for item in $results; do
        nix search "nixpkgs#${item%.*}"
    done

will search for a specific executable and give you (hopefully) reasonable output. If you don't have flakes enabled, you can just print the result of the command-substitution directly, but you won't get the short description.