One of the healthiest habits I’ve picked up over the years is to keep trying new tools — even, and especially, for things I use dozens of times a day. That applies whether you’re switching between commercial apps, trying a different free software project, or, in my case, maintaining your own fork of something you could just install from a package manager.

Getting attached to tools keeps you in the past. The terminal you patched in 2021 made sense in 2021. The editor you learned in 2011 made sense in 2011. But the ecosystem moves on, and if you’re not periodically asking “is there something better now?”, comfort slowly turns into friction you stop noticing.

This post is written simply for myself to mark the date when I fully decided to ditch Ansible’s containers.podman.podman_containers, and Podman’s nasty port of docker-compose, in favour of Quadlet. Hopefully this page can serve as a useful reference for others considering the same move.

Problems with containers.podman.podman_containers

Ansible is great, but it’s a pain if you ssh on to a server, to find a container is down. You then have to jump on to another server to run the playbook to start the container.

There are a lot of cool Linux commands and tools you COULD learn, but what’s the point in investing a bunch of time if you just use them once a week, or once a month? A good example I like to give is Vim — it takes a long time to learn and master, but I use it over 10 times a day so it’s worth it.

vim — the universal text editor

I remember thinking vim was stupid — so many keypresses and shortcuts to remember. Before that I was a nano user. What got me to switch? I started getting really annoyed that all the servers I was logging into didn’t have nano installed, didn’t have syntax highlighting, and similar. I consciously stuck with it and now I have a text editor that I love on every server.

Speed up your command line navigation

Photo by Kevin Ku from Pexels

Knowing a few key shortcuts can have a surprising impact. As someone who sits frequently with others over a command line to help debug code and navigate servers, it’s easy to become frustrated on their behalf at how cumbersome things can be when you may not know time-saving shortcuts.

Here are some essential shortcuts and key tips to help you speed up your command line usage.

We’ve all been there, you just want to hack up a quick Ansible playbook to do a quick task, and then you find yourself fighting with syntax, chopping and changing things around, wondering why this simple Ansible playbook isn’t working. Let me give you a few hints to make your life easier.

This is especially useful if you’re on a new machine that doesn’t come with all your personal configuration, dotfiles and preferred editors! This happens to me quite a lot when setting up new environments.