As mentioned in previous posts, Toolbx gives Fedora Silverblue a mutable environment for installing command-line tools without layering them onto the host. A single container is enough to get started, but my preference is to create a separate Toolbx container for each tool I use regularly.

Fedora Silverblue is an immutable operating system, so I try to avoid layering packages onto the host unless they are needed by the system itself. For command-line tools, Toolbx provides a convenient alternative: it gives me a familiar Fedora environment with dnf, while keeping those packages outside the host image.

This post shows how to create a Toolbx container, install Neovim in it, and launch Neovim from the host with a small Zsh alias.

If you’re already using Fedora Silverblue, you’re likely comfortable with its container first workflow and the role Podman plays as the default runtime. But even in a Podman native environment, there are still cases where Docker compatibility matters — especially when working with tools that rely on Docker specific behavior.

Given that cron is not installed by default on a Fedora Silverblue host, it can either be added as a layered package or you can use systemd which is available by default.

Setting up a local dev environment with Traefik as the proxy has some benefits:

• highly configurable
• only need to expose required ports on the Traefik container
• simplifies configuring SSL certificates and redirects for each dev site.

Given the benefits, I found it worth while investing the time and effort in learning enough about Traefik to apply those benefits to new projects as it simplifies config for each new project.