Quick review of Zellij

Reviewing a modern terminal multiplexer.

There are two pieces of sticky software that I have never been able to escape from: vim & tmux.

tmux in particular was a huge upgrade for me over my previous workflow. It was the first time I realized that terminals could be smarter and do splits, tabs, etc.

Those things are built into terminal apps now, but ten years ago, as I was getting comfortable in the command-line, it was mind-blowing!

But I have always fought with tmux over a few specific things: sane scroll behavior, keybindings, and theming.

Not sure where I first saw Zellij, but when it was mentioned as a modern tmux, I was intrigued! Now, after a few weeks of usage, I’m confident Zellij is going to replace tmux on all my machines.

It has great defaults for those three things I mentioned above. Scrolling via the trackpad just works in Zellij. Zellij makes its keybindings very visible (see screenshots), but it also has support for the default tmux keybidings, which is a neat touch considering I have a decade of muscle memory doing <C-b> n, <C-b> p, etc. I’ll slowly relearn those habits, but having that to fallback onto is great.

I’m excited to dig into some of the more advanced functionality too - I see that it has floating shell support, it can revive sessions after they’ve been killed, and I’m sure there’s a lot more I haven’t even discovered yet.

Like a lot of really good CLIs, it’s been unobtrusive while I get my bearings. The complex stuff is still there! But I know it will stay out of my way until I’m ready for it.

It’s a fun time to be into command-line tools! So many new things to try out.