Published

All published posts

2717 posts latest post 2026-11-11
Publishing rhythm
Oct 2026 | 30 posts
⭐ tidwall jj
tidwall has done a fantastic job with jj. Highly recommend taking a look. JSON Stream Editor (command line utility)
⭐ darrenburns elia
I recently discovered elia by darrenburns, and it’s truly impressive. A snappy, keyboard-centric terminal user interface for interacting with large language models. Chat with ChatGPT, Claude, Llama 3, Phi 3, Mistral, Gemma and more.

paru is an aur helper that allows you to use a package manager to install packages from the aur.

What’s the Aur #

The Aur is a set of community managed packages that can be installed on arch based distros.

Why a helper? #

paru just makes it easy, no clone and run makepkg. You can do everything paru can do using the built in pacman installer.

Manual Install from the Aur #

You will need to manually instal pacman from the aur in order to get started.

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -si

Installing packages with paru #

Once setup you are ready to install packages from the AUR just like the core repos.

# you can update your system using paru
paru -Syu

# you can install packages from the AUR
paru -S tailscale
paru -S prismlauncher

# even core repo packages can be installed
paru -S docker

Paru in Docker #

Here is a snippet from my devtainer dockerfile. Where I use paru to install packages from the AUR inside of a dockerfile.

FROM archlinux

RUN echo '[multilib]' >> /etc/pacman.conf && \
    echo 'Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist' >> /etc/pacman.conf && \
    pacman --noconfirm -Syyu && \
    pacman --noconfirm -S base-devel git && \
    groupadd --gid 1000 devtainer && \
    useradd --uid 1000 --gid 1000 -m -r -s /bin/bash devtainer && \
    passwd -d devtainer && \
    echo 'devtainer ALL=(ALL) ALL' > /etc/sudoers.d/devtainer && \
    mkdir -p /home/devtainer/.gnupg && \
    echo 'standard-resolver' > /home/devtainer/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf && \
    chown -R devtainer:devtainer /home/devtainer && \
    mkdir /build && \
    chown -R devtainer:devtainer /build && \
    cd /build && \
    sudo -u devtainer git clone --depth 1 https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git && \
    cd paru && \
    sudo -u devtainer makepkg --noconfirm -si && \
    sed -i 's/#RemoveMake/RemoveMake/g' /etc/paru.conf && \
    pacman -Qtdq | xargs -r pacman --noconfirm -Rcns && \
    rm -rf /home/devtainer/.cache && \
    rm -rf /build

USER devtainer
RUN sudo -u devtainer paru --noconfirm --skipreview --useask -S \
    bat \
    cargo \
    direnv \
    dua-cli \
    dust \
    fd

Final Thoughts #

There are other options out there, paru seemed to be the most supported at the time I started using arch and there has been no other reason for me to change it. It’s treated me well for nearly a year now.

I took a break

Life comes in waves, and sometimes you need to set down some of your projects to focus on others. For the first part of 2023 I’ve really had a lot of family stuff to focus on, we also are pretty new homeowners and are still trying to get our new to us house cleaned up and modernized. Side Projects You can see in my growing list of repos that I have poked around on quite a few side projects over the past few months. This has been quite relaxng to me, mostly things that I use to learn from, but also a lot that are tools and things I use that bring me joy. Pydantic I haven’t wrote about it at all yet, but I have really been starting to lean into pydantic on all of these side projects. I have really been enjoying the type system. A good friend @pypeaday got me hooked and we have been throwing around this phrase that he learned from a math professor “Make it So”. The idea boils down to leveraging pydantic to make all the values you want to exist up front, or fail validation, then have no mo…
⭐ AckslD swenv.nvim
I’m impressed by swenv.nvim from AckslD. Tiny plugin to quickly switch python virtual environments from within neovim without restarting.
⭐ mtshiba pylyzer
I’m really excited about pylyzer, an amazing project by mtshiba. It’s worth exploring! A fast, feature-rich static code analyzer & language server for Python

Pydantic and singledispatch

I was reading about pydantic-singledispatch from Giddeon’s blog and found it very intersting. I’m getting ready to implement pydantic on my static site generator markata, and I think there are so uses for this idea, so I want to try it out. The Idea Let’s set up some pydantic settings. We will need separate Models for each environment that we want to support for this to work. The whole idea is to use and type hints to provide unique execution for each environment. We might want something like a path_prefix in prod for environments like GithubPages that deploy to while keeping the root at in dev. Settings Model Here is our model for our settings. We will create a CommonSettings model that will be used by all environments. We will also create a model that will be used in dev and that will be used in prod. We will use as the discriminator so pydantic knows which model to use. Singledispatch Now let’s create our function. We will use to provide a unique execution for each environment. It w…
2 min read
python
⭐ sinaptik-ai pandas-ai
I’m impressed by pandas-ai from sinaptik-ai. Chat with your database or your datalake (SQL, CSV, parquet). PandasAI makes data analysis conversational using LLMs and RAG.
⭐ Textualize frogmouth
If you’re into interesting projects, don’t miss out on frogmouth, created by Textualize. A Markdown browser for your terminal
⭐ dfee forge
Check out forge by dfee. It’s a well-crafted project with great potential. forge (python signatures) for fun and profit
⭐ Slackadays Clipboard
I like Slackadays’s project Clipboard. 😎🏖️🐬 Your new, 𝙧𝙞𝙙𝙤𝙣𝙠𝙪𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙞𝙤𝙪𝙨𝙡𝙮 smart clipboard manager
⭐ madox2 vim-ai
I like madox2’s project vim-ai. AI-powered code assistant for Vim. OpenAI and ChatGPT plugin for Vim and Neovim.
⭐ TabbyML tabby
tabby by TabbyML is a game-changer in its space. Excited to see how it evolves. Self-hosted AI coding assistant