Thanks to Leo for bringing up this missing feature on IRC. I've been meaning to implement this for awhile but lacked motivation. ;) With this patch, you can freely compose packages whose inputs should be in the environment with ad-hoc packages that should be added to the environment directly. For example, here's how to create a Guix development environment that additionally has strace: guix environment guix --ad-hoc strace The --load and --expression options are --ad-hoc aware as well. Yay, composability!