I’ve not really needed VSCode to store secrets until now.

I’ve had the same issue on Signal but I just patched together a desktop file in /home/USERNAME/.local/share/applications like the following:

Note that I have put signal on the user packages below (replace USERNAME with your username (or if you’re using system packages /run/current-system/sw/bin/signal-desktop))

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Signal Gnome Libsecret
Terminal=false
Exec=/etc/profiles/per-user/USERNAME/bin/signal-desktop --password-store=gnome-libsecret
Icon=/etc/profiles/per-user/USERNAME/share/icons/hicolor/512x512/apps/signal-desktop.png

I could do the same with VSCode, but since I always launch it from the terminal like code ., the desktop file is not invoked leading to it not picking up the --password-store option.

So, digging a little into Nix I came up with the following solution that worked well for me.

Here I assume that you have gnome-keyring working already.

My abbreviated /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

  users.users.USERNAME = {
    packages = with pkgs; [
      (symlinkJoin {
        name = "signal-desktop";
        paths = [ signal-desktop ];
        nativeBuildInputs = [ makeWrapper ];
        postBuild = ''
          wrapProgram $out/bin/signal-desktop \
            --add-flags "--password-store=gnome-libsecret"
        '';
      })
      (symlinkJoin {
        # Note: here I use `vscode-fhs`, you can use `vscode` instead
        name = "vscode-fhs";
        paths = [ vscode-fhs ];
        nativeBuildInputs = [ makeWrapper ];
        postBuild = ''
          wrapProgram $out/bin/code \
            --add-flags "--password-store=gnome-libsecret"
        '';
      })
    ];
  };

Metadata

$ sway --version
sway version 1.11

NixOS 25.11

Sorry, not the editor Cursor…

When I moved from GNOME Desktop to Sway on my NixOS machine I noticed that my cursor was missing in LibreWolf (Firefox with more privacy). This wasn’t an issue on GNOME, which I previously used.

I searched the internet a little, but didn’t find anything covering Sway, NixOS and missing cursors.

I tested which cursors were missing using MDN CSS Cursor and realized that a lot of them were missing.

I like the default cursors on GNOME, so I found out that they were called Adwaita.

Solution

To ensure that those cursors were available I added the following to my nix configuration.

  programs.sway = {
    enable = true;
    wrapperFeatures.gtk = true;
    extraPackages = with pkgs; [
      adwaita-icon-theme
      # I have more packages here, but I omitted them for brevity
    ];
  };

Then I configured sway using

seat seat0 xcursor_theme Adwaita 24

After reloading sway (or signing out and then in again) the issue was solved.

Metadata

$ sway --version
sway version 1.10.1

NixOS 25.05