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ndrlast Monday at 3:02 PM22 repliesview on HN

I gave up on it once I discovered https://zellij.dev/

Just even for how tab and panes are setup, and how it's good for scrolling and text selection with your mouse for copy pasting.


Replies

clintonclast Monday at 8:56 PM

<button type="button" class="download-hover" onclick="location.href='https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/releases/latest/downloa...'"> linux download </button>

Screaming into the void, I guess, but PSA. Don't use buttons for links. In my case, I couldn't right-click and copy the URL, but there are a lot of other reasons not to do this.

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btreecattoday at 1:44 PM

Big fan of sane defaults like this.

I like tmux, but I no longer spend time customizing it for every server I run it on, only to be tripped up on some new server I haven't set-up yet.

ghshephardlast Monday at 6:49 PM

The only (deal breaker for me ) weakness of zellij - doesn't support copy/paste from the keyboard (from the screen/scrollback) and doesn't support multiple copy/paste buffers.

I do that roughly every 60-90 seconds with tmux - so, until the zellij developers relent (they suggest the "proper way" of copy paste is to pipe the data into a text editor and use that - but has the downside of not supporting system copy-paste buffers.) - no options other than to stick with tmux (or fork zellij - but that seems a bit much....)

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fullstoplast Monday at 5:38 PM

I have a few embedded devices where flash space is limited. tmux is so much smaller than zellij, and it's not even close.

Zellij is close to 50 megabytes, but tmux and all dependent libraries (minus libc, it's always there) is about 2 megabytes.

senderistalast Monday at 5:23 PM

I have been using zmx for the last 2 weeks. It's still a bit buggy (screen repainting) but quite pleasant to use with ghostty.

https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx

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ori_blast Monday at 6:31 PM

Once I discovered window managers and graphics, I stopped using half-baked features to emulate them in the terminal.

I use tmux to reattach to programs after the network connection dies, and not really anything else. I would welcome a version of it that stripped out everything but that, and just replayed the last few pages of scrollback on reattach.

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snapplebobapplelast Monday at 6:18 PM

I did the same, however, I recently switched back because zellij has just gotten too annoyingly bloated. I ended up on tmuxp to build my tmux session and autossh to keep me connected to my various ssh sessions and am much happier.

hesdeadjimlast Monday at 3:34 PM

100%. Tmux didn’t click for me but Zellij did within 5 minutes. Lifelong Vim user so it felt a lot more familiar.

dns_sneklast Monday at 3:37 PM

Cool, I'm one of the lucky ten thousand today. Thanks.

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heavyset_goyesterday at 1:47 AM

Just use byobu, zellij does weird things, byobu just uses tmux (or screen) and has a sane mouse TUI

semiinfinitelylast Monday at 10:00 PM

I tried zellij and it feels like its ui was designed by someone raised in the world of blade runner 2049

LinXitoWyesterday at 12:06 AM

Last time I tried zellij, a bunch of the default keybinds conflicted with default commands, or maybe vim commands, I can't remember. But the "solution" back then was constantly jumping in and out of "locked" mode, where no zellij keybindings except unlock work.

Didn't seem worth it, considering the giant footprint in comparison to tmux.

bigbugbagyesterday at 3:14 PM

I clicked and instantly gave up on Zellij due to the horrible design fails on the first page supposed to introduce the software to the user.

upfront breaking the basic expectation of having a clickable link is enough for me to know that this piece of software is badly designed and is not worth my time.

xvilkayesterday at 3:50 AM

Zellij still can't hide/show the status bar on the fly[1] and doesn't support windows preview in the windows list mode. Just these two (and many more) things are enough to stop me from migrating from tmux.

[1] https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/694

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moontearyesterday at 10:22 AM

I really don't like tools that are not distributed via official package managers like apt / apk.

katorlast Monday at 5:59 PM

I tried tmux so many times, could not commit the sequences to memory, but then zellij was just out of the gate, easy to "discover," and then I started writing plugins (rust wasm), and I even submitted a PR which got accepted to support background colors in panes/tabs.

I am a monthly donor, I think it has the right balance of community plus the lead dev has a vision, opinionated but open to inputs, and focused.

llagerloflast Monday at 3:07 PM

I used tmux for a few years, until one day I discovered Zellij. With its significantly better UI and overall user experience, I was instantly convinced.

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KetoManx64last Monday at 3:56 PM

Same here. I bounced off it a few times because KDE konsole already had built in tab/pane support but once I picked up neovim the key chords for triggering actions just made so much sense compared to the static key binds of Console that I just started using Zellij for tabs and panes within Console.

pmarreckyesterday at 6:03 AM

Tried it. It’s certainly prettier and has a few unique features but a number of corner cases I depend on in tmux simply don’t work so back I went

Also, can’t really stand the name.

snthpylast Monday at 5:50 PM

This sentiment seems to be shared widely. Is there a good conversion guide for tmux users?

I tried zellij a couple of years ago when it first got popular and it didn't click for me.

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christiansafkalast Monday at 4:24 PM

If anyone is looking for a slightly higher level management of persistent sessions, we just launched https://haventerminal.com for Mac

garymikloslast Monday at 4:16 PM

I prefer smux.dev