Create a Zellij instance with a useful session name

Fixing one of zellij's annoying quirks.

#tip#unix

zellij is a great modern alternative to tmux.

The only thing I don’t like about it is the random session names. Every session is automatically named something like colorful-aardvark when you start it up. This makes it very hard to find existing sessions for projects when you come back to them.

The za alias either uses the current directory name, or a parameter as the session_name variable. It then tries to join an existing zellij session with that name, or creates a new one:

Terminal window
za() {
  local session_name=${1:-${PWD:t}}
  zellij attach "$session_name" || zellij -s "$session_name"
}

Now, in any directory, you can type za. For instance, if I’m in ~/src/blog, it will look for a session called blog and join it, or create a new one if it doesn’t exist.