I actually wrote a script which creates a trampoline launcher for this. It has its flaws but it solves the spotlight issue, and supports pinning to Dock across updates.

Available as a plug-and-play module for nix-darwin and home-manager: https://github.com/hraban/mac-app-util

This is great! I run a script with mkalias[1] which works fine but all icons have this ugly arrow. Yours works perfectly - only thing missing is the icon in the spotlight search.

EDIT: Hm seems to not affect every app.

[1] https://github.com/reckenrode/mkalias

I have a post hook that renders a Automator app to Applications to call the next one for me. Seems to work well for the few apps I use like that.

Instead of Spotlight I use Raycast. It has been working great for me.

I also do that, but when I search for emacs for example I get like 2-3 different ones and they are named as the full path in the nix store. That sometimes goes away after some time with indexing, but sometimes it does not. And another annoying issue is that sometimes even when theres only one, its called by the path, and Im not a wizard so I don’t know if that path is the latest, so I am still using outdated software because its not launching the newest version.

Did you have any of these issues?