most; DB Quacks; CSS Bed

The theme-less Thursays seem destined to continue, but that also means there is likely something for everyone in today’s Drop.

TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop using SmolLM3-3B-8bit via MLX and a custom prompt.)

The first section and last section really “confused” the model. Took forever and provided no links for the last two bullets (I had to add them).

• Most (heh) of us grew up in the terminal with more and less. They’re fine for scrolling through logs or man pages, but sometimes you want more than less. That’s where most (WP GH) comes into play. It offers features like splitting screens, lockable scrolling, wide file support, ANSI color support, and mouse wheel scrolling, making it a powerful tool for debugging live traffic by allowing simultaneous viewing of multiple logs.
• DB Quacks is an interactive SQL tutorial with 38 levels, teaching the fundamentals through real-time query results and a friendly learning experience, making it ideal for knowledge workers and data professionals. (https://dbquacks.com/tutorial/1)
• CSS Bed is a comprehensive resource listing classless CSS reset themes, offering a list of 20+ themes that instantly make you appear proficient in CSS, even without memorizing class names. (https://www.cssbed.com/)

most

Most (heh) of us grew up in the terminal with more and less. They’re fine for scrolling through logs or man pages, but sometimes you want more than less. That’s where most (WP) (GH) comes into play.

But, first: why bother with yet-another pager? Well, the quick skinny on most is that it comes with many batteries included:

• you can split your terminal and look at more than one file at a time.
• lockable scrolling lets you line things up between panes and scroll them together.
• it has wide file support, so you can pan horizontally or toggle wrapping when your log lines go long.
• it understands ANSI color sequences and even truecolor (see example below)
• you can actually scroll with your mouse wheel inside of it.

Think of it as a genetically modified like with some genes spliced in from both less and tmux.

Say you’re troubleshooting nginx and want to watch your error log and access log at the same time. Instead of juggling multiple panes or editors, you can just use most and split the screen (hit H in most to see all the common key sequences) like you see in the section header. In that image, we’ve got two stacked windows: errors on top, requests on the bottom. You can scroll them independently, or lock them together and watch how that 502 maps to the actual request. It’s a simple but powerful way to debug live traffic without flipping around.

Another neat trick that I use extensively is to pipe colorized JSON into most. For example:

jq -C . 2025-09.json | most

Instead of getting raw, eye-watering JSON, you get a colorized, scrollable, mouse-friendly view you can page through comfortably. Arrow keys, regex search (/), and horizontal panning make structured data far less painful to deal with.

It supports a .mostrc config file, and I’ve found this setup pretty handy:

# --- Navigation ---
setkey next-screen      " "      # Space = page down
setkey prev-screen      "b"      # b = page up
setkey search-forward   "/"      # / = forward search
setkey search-backward  "?"      # ? = backward search
setkey bob              "g"      # g = beginning of buffer
setkey eob              "G"      # G = end of buffer

# --- Quality of life ---
# By default, squeeze multiple blank lines
squeeze
# Wrap long lines instead of truncating
wrap

Oh! Almost forgot: it can unpack gzip’d files on the fly to view then and even has a great binary viewer mode.

I highly suggest reading the manual page and the jedsoft.org link at the top of this section to really grok all that you can do, then spend time customizing the tool for your use.

You will likely need to use your system’s package manager to install most since it is a relatively new utility and not shipped standard with many distros.

DB Quacks

I usually save up DuckDB links for a 100% DuckDB Drop, but this was too cool to wait.

DB Quacks is an interactive tutorial that teaches folks the fundamentals of SQL. The intent is/was to provide a friendly and accessible learning experience where folks can write real SQL queries and see the results instantly.

You follow Duckbert on a journey, solving challenges and mastering new concepts along the way (and, the creators are working on turning it into a full-on data-driven adventure game dubbed “The Great Duck Migration”). For now, it appears there are 38 levels in the base game.

I’m of the opine most everyone who has a “knowledge worker” position should get familiar with some SQL, and anyone who works with any kind of data should absolutely be able to perform a certain set of query idioms. If you’re not-too-familiar with SQL, need to brush up your skills, or want to finally learn the duck-flavored variety of SQL, this is a great way to do so.

CSS Bed

CSS Bed (GH) is a one-stop shop to see all of the classless CSS reset base themes currently available across the internets. I somehow missed this resource when crafting the handful of CSS-focused Drops over the past few years.

It links to a boatload of themes, which I will shamelessly reproduce here:

• HTML only
• awsm.css
• bahunya
• bamboo
• bootstrap
• evenbettermotherfucking
• holiday.css
• kacit
• marx
• meyer
• minicss
• no-class
• pico.css
• sakura
• sakura-vader
• simple.css
• stylize.css
• tacit
• thebestmotherfucking
• tufte
• vanillacss
• w3c-chocolate
• w3c-traditional
• water.css-dark
• water.css-light
• writ
• yorha

We’ll dig into a few of those I haven’t covered in future Drops.

Using any one of these themes instantly makes you look like you know CSS, even if you haven’t memorized the lower-cased hieroglyphics that appear in class="" blocks in most modern web pages.

FIN

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