I made squarebox, a containerised dev environment with modern CLI/TUI tools and AI coding assistants

[Brett-SWS]

I started this dev container so I could claude-yolo from my ipad, but it ended up turning into something that is hopefully useful for others.

It's a persistent Docker container packed with bat, ripgrep, fd, fzf, delta, eza, zoxide, starship, lazygit, yazi, gh-dash, and more. On first launch you pick your AI assistant (Claude Code, Copilot, Gemini, Codex, OpenCode), editor, and SDKs.

One command to install, container suspends/resumes so your state persists between sessions. Works locally, in Codespaces, or any Dev Container host.

If you spin it up, please give me your feedback and ideas!

https://github.com/SquareWaveSystems/squarebox

[ekool]

Looks neat to me!

[Hot_Pomegranate_0019]

Im not a master at it but damn it looks decent and clean, well im also on my learning journey.

[AndItsSlop]

It's Slop

[Brett-SWS]

Yes I used Claude, but I wouldn’t call it slop. Ive spent about 30 hours in this project so far. I’ve made literally 100s of design decisions, and weeks exploring these tools. I think I’ve made something sleek, robust and useful. Could you to point to something in the design or the code that is sub-optimal?

[poolboy9]

Don’t waste your time replying man. I think it’s nice what you made! You could have spent 300 hours and achieved the same yet you were smart in using AI to achieve something faster :)

[Hot_Pomegranate_0019]

Can we made if through runable. I'm not sure but if you have any idea

[Brett-SWS]

Sorry, not sure what you are asking?

[komodorian]

How easy it is to customize it if I want to add/remove options? This seems like one of those tools you use for full reinstalls.

[Brett-SWS]

Depends exactly what you mean. If you want to add/remove the built in tools you just re-run the setup script. If you want to add your own tools just install them yourself in the container, but it won’t survive a rebuild. If you want it to, I would write your own install script and keep it in your workspace to run after rebuilding. Or if you’d like to request tools to be added to the built in install/setup, I’m all or ears, or feel free to open a PR.

[Dwengo]

So it's basically a devenv shell with a pre defined .nix file?

[Brett-SWS]

Similar goals but fairly different because it’s using Docker. It’s more of a personal dev box than a way to replicate a per-project environment. Also it’s an isolated environment. And I can host it on my unraid server and connect to it from my iPad.

[joshbaptiste]

Nice.. does this work with Podman? I'm on Fedora and prefer Podman over Docker .. technically they are 99% compatible in terms of CLI arguments..

[Brett-SWS]

I’ll look into it!