Some stuff I've learned recently

Earlier today I was reading a post titled Some cool things I learned in the first half of 2025 and I thought it was an interesting concept. I think I should share things I’ve learned recently instead of waiting for it to come up in a longform post about a project.

Easier Wireguard

I’ll be honest, I haven’t set this up yet. But, it is one of my next projects.

Before I was using Tailscale I used PiVPN because it was a dead simple way to get either a Wireguard or OpenVPN connection going on a Raspberry Pi. I don’t need 99% of the features Tailscale has, I only want to be another device on my LAN while I’m out of the house. PiVPN covered that perfectly. Unfortunately the dev for PiVPN took a step back from the project and it lead me to look at other options, which is why I landed on Tailscale.

Last week I learned that the folks at LinuxServer.io have a Wireguard container and it looks as simple as it gets. I am so excited to see this.

Nothing against the Tailscale project. I just don’t need that many options. Just get me to my LAN, that’s all I need. This is a holiday weekend in the US, so I will probably dig into setting up a Wireguard VPN server.

Tmux floating windows

This blew my mind when I first read about it. Built right into tmux is the ability to have floating panes. I learned about it after watching a video on zellij attempting to see what the hype is about. I will admit, zellij is cool, but I am so used to tmux I really don’t have any reason to switch. So, this led me to see if tmux has the same capability. It sure does, pal.

I watched this video about tmux popups and made some changes to my configuration file.

First, I added C-a z to open a popup and added a one thing that was in the video, which is to open a popup and start a new session. Next, I added C-a r that will open a popup and launch yazi in that popup. Last, I added C-a y to open a popup and lauch gitui in the current directory.

Here is the additions to my conf file:

  # - - - Floating windows section - - -                                      
  #                                                                           
  # - - - Open a pop-up window - - -                                          
  bind z display-popup \                                                      
    -w 80% \                                                                  
    -h 80%                                                                    
  # - - - Open a pop-up and launch a new tmux session - - -                   
  bind n display-popup -E 'bash -i -c "read -p \"Session name: \" name; tmux  
  new-session -d -s \$name && tmux switch-client -t \$name"'                  
  # Search and select a tmux session in a pop-up                              
  bind j display-popup -E "tmux list-sessions | sed -E 's/:.*$//' | grep -v   
  \"^$(tmux display-message -p '#S')\$\" | fzf --reverse | xargs tmux switch- 
  client -t"                                                                  
  # - - - Open yazi file manager in a pop-up window - - -                     
  bind r display-popup \                                                      
    -d "#{pane_current_path}" \                                               
    -w 90% \                                                                  
    -h 90% \                                                                  
    -E "yazi"                                                                 
  # - - - Open a pop-up in the current dir and start gitui - -                
  bind y display-popup \                                                      
    -d "#{pane_current_path}" \                                               
    -w 80% \                                                                  
    -h 80% \                                                                  
    -E "gitui"                              

Yazi with tmux

After getting comfortable with tmux popups, I realized I am probably under-utilizing tmux in other workflows. I am an avid user of yazi, a fantastic file manager for the terminal. Thinking about tmux popups, I wanted to add the ability to have shortcuts for opening directories or files in new tmux panes or popups. Combining this with my preferred text editor has made my yazi + tmux + helix workflow so much fun.

I take notes and write these posts with Helix in markdown. I have Yazi configured with openers to edit markdown files with Helix and preview with Glow. In my updated Yazi toml I have added options to edit the file in Helix in a Tmux popup and edit the file in Helix in a new Tmux tab. This gives me a few options depending on what I’m working on. I could simply select a file and open it right in the same Tmux tab. I could also have it pop out to a floating window and keep Yazi open in the background. Or, I can have the file opened in a new Tmux tab and leave my current tab alone.

This is my new Yazi toml:

[opener]
edit = [
  { run = 'hx "$@"', block = true, desc = "Helix in current window" },
  { run = 'tmux display-popup -h 80% -w 80% hx "$@"', block = true, desc = "Helix in a tmux popup" },
  { run = 'tmux new-window hx "$@"', block = true, desc = "Helix in a tmux tab" },
]
open = [
  { run = 'glow "$@"', block = true, desc = "Glow" },
]
[open]
prepend_rules = [
  { name = "*.md", use = ["open", "edit"] },
]
[manager]
show_hidden = true

Updates to apt

Reading about some of the updates coming to Debian 13 I learned about the --update flag and its awesome. I haven’t upgraded my Debian systems yet, but I got to try it out on another system that gets updates faster and probably had this for a while. I’m just learning about it now.

The --update flag lets you combine some tasks. For example, you can run sudo apt --update upgrade and do both in one command. Or, you can do sudo apt --update install $PACKAGE. This is something small, but awesome. I know other package managers already do similar things, like updated the cache and installing in one command. But I don’t care about those because I love Debian.

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