What's the difference between programs and home.packages?

[jjant]

I have some programs installed through programs, and others through home.packages:

{ pkgs, ... }:
{
  # ...
  home.packages = with pkgs; [
    jq
  ];
  programs = {
    fzf.enable = true;
  };
}

What's the difference between the two?

[ivandimitrov8080]

In my experience the packages array provides your environment with just the executable and programs provides some additional configuration and installation options by default and some that you can set as well.

[teto]

most of the time they are the same, but the executable provided by programs has more context thanks to your module configuration so it can be smarter and do extra-stuff like enable some user-wide configuration. When in doubt, you should enable the latter.
Note that HM is not very consistent so programs.XX.enable wont necessarily add XX in PATH so you might have to double check.