Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included

Most of the time, my need for terminal multiplexers are accommodated by tiling window managers and workspaces. When I do use Zellij, it's when I'm on my laptop and no sockets are nearby. Then I boot onto console and use Zellij for the scroll, split panes, and session management. A replacement for the desktop if you will. Quite handy.

The landing page does a bad job at explaining what it is, same with the first page of the documentation.

I get it from the other comments that it's a terminal multiplexer, and considered an alternative to tmux. But tmux and screen are well established, and should take the opportunity to explain in what way it is different from those.

An endorsement: I freaking love Zellij. I mainly use it like one might use Tmux, to keep remote sessions alive so I can reconnect to them from another host than where I began the session:

* Ssh in to myserver.cloud from my laptop. Run Zellij. Fire off various long-running processes in multiple tabs.

* On my commute home, ssh in from my phone, run `zellij attach`, and check on the status of those processes.

* Once home, ssh in from my desktop, run `zellij attach`, and continue where I left off earlier.

Tmux is nice, but Zellij fits my brain a lot better. Plus, it has a lot of UI affordances to discover features without me having to memorize keystrokes. I use these kinds of tools often enough to care about them, but not so often or in such depth that I'm any kind of a power user. There are certain things I do so rarely in Tmux that I have to look up the manual every single time I do them. With Zellij, I don't have to.

I don't understand the idea to make everything terminal-centric. It should be one component of all the tools available to the programmer.

All text editors worth using have a way to open a terminal for that one time you need it, everything else should be a GUI (with all the advantages that come with it).

2025 and actual devs are still recommending to type "bash <(curl -L ...)" into a terminal...

I like Zellij, but one point of friction I ran into was it not loading profile configurations like .zprofile. https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/1434

My dream workspace is a real browser (with all dev tools), with integrated terminal emulator and integrated editor. Editor plugins could be prototyped with web technology and debugged on the fly (like Obsidian plugins). Is there anything like this?

Neat. Any idea how well it runs on the linux console, or fbterm perhaps? Maybe there is a better fbterm by now, remember it being a bit lacking as well.

Is there improved guidance on migrating from tmux to zellij?

I've attempted to move over a few times, and while this is certainly user skill, it just felt too different from screen/tmux. Perhaps I should bite the bullet and force myself to get used to a new paradigm...

I'm a terminal person and would love to try new things. But I just spent a few minutes on their page and have no idea why I would try to use it.

Can anyone help me learn why this over, say, kitty?

Does it support sending and executing commands to the panes like tmux does?

like this:

tmux send-keys -t 0:1.1 "ls" Enter

edit: well, yes, you can:

zellij action write-chars ls

zellij action write 10

Fwiw lots of submissions over the years. I thought there was one a couple weeks ago but not seeing it. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zellij