I wanted to use Nix on Mac, but the only supported setup is the one that puts a persistent daemon in the background, which just doesn't sit well with me for a package manager – something that I use maybe once a month, maybe even less. I don't understand why they didn't go with setuid.

checkout https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

> Devbox is a command-line tool that lets you easily create isolated shells for development

it uses nix, and they just added

`devbox global`

> Devbox Global allows you to add packages to a global devbox.json. This is useful for installing a standard set of tools you want to use across multiple Devbox Projects. You can also use Devbox Global to install and manage packages on your Host OS, as a substitute for tools like brew or apt-get.

https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox/releases/tag/0.4.0