I use Zellij everyday. It's been awesome - copying text from a pane, easy scrollback, session resurrection. Yes, all of this is possible with tmux, but I had to do ZERO configuration on zellij. That being said, I worry about "terminal based desktop", that feels like a lot of stuff packed into zellij (which I personally want to use as terminal multiplexer). Will be interesting to see how it evolves. Great project so far!
I really like the zellij UI, but have never been able to get past its historic lack of support for shifted modifiers (e.g., `Ctrl+Shift+,`), which makes using some TUIs difficult (like emacs, without reconfiguration). https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/3789 frames it as a protocol issue, which might be true, but it doesn't seem to be an issue for other terminal multiplexers (e.g., tmux, herdr) with other terminal applications (e.g., Terminal.app, iTerm2, ghostty, ptyxis), whether or not I disable KKP for zellij (or in the terminal app itself, or both). If that issue were fixed, I'd be more inclined to switch and support the project.
I have used it every day for a year or so and mostly it's been great. Call me old fashioned, but the feature creep and massive PRs with unreviewable binary blobs in the repo are concerning.
It's already a terminal multiplexer, wasm extension host, and webserver. What problem is being solved by bundling in yet another vibed terminal emulator?
I feel similarly. I jumped on because I prefer applications in languages that I know (and could potentially contribute to) and was experiencing some intermittent and difficult-to-reproduce crashes in tmux (that I assumed were memory safety bugs). But now it seems with each release there are a dozen new features that I don't have time to explore but have potential to impact the long-term health of the project.
Also the keybinding collisions with helix are frustrating -- highly configurable but takes some effort to get sorted and nixified.
This project was created in the pre-AI era. It's been running for 6 years. Most of the features have been on the roadmap for a while now. This isn't vibe-coded.
I saw that too. It's a [dev-dependency], so perhaps used for testing?
I tried to compare the source but didn't find any similarity, not even in the source file structure. The style is distinct. For example, Alacritty's source code is commented, Zellij-terminal's source is not.
Having Zellij _also_ be a first-class terminal emulator is ridiculously cool. I have so much muscle-memory in tmux+zsh/fish, but on Windows, Zellij + Nushell is such a life-saver, I'm considering putting in the effort to switch.
Fish doesn't run on Windows unless you're in WSL. In WSL I'm running fish, to be sure, but I prefer nu to PowerShell when I have to navigate the Windows host. Windows is required for my work, BTW - For the record I infinitely prefer Linux/macOS.
These are personal (not necessarily technical) reasons, but nu is Rust/community-driven as opposed to C#/Microsoft. I can see myself using nu in more contexts than just my Windows box (yes, I know that PowerShell runs on other platforms as well).
I use Zellij everyday. It's been awesome - copying text from a pane, easy scrollback, session resurrection. Yes, all of this is possible with tmux, but I had to do ZERO configuration on zellij. That being said, I worry about "terminal based desktop", that feels like a lot of stuff packed into zellij (which I personally want to use as terminal multiplexer). Will be interesting to see how it evolves. Great project so far!
I really like the zellij UI, but have never been able to get past its historic lack of support for shifted modifiers (e.g., `Ctrl+Shift+,`), which makes using some TUIs difficult (like emacs, without reconfiguration). https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/3789 frames it as a protocol issue, which might be true, but it doesn't seem to be an issue for other terminal multiplexers (e.g., tmux, herdr) with other terminal applications (e.g., Terminal.app, iTerm2, ghostty, ptyxis), whether or not I disable KKP for zellij (or in the terminal app itself, or both). If that issue were fixed, I'd be more inclined to switch and support the project.
I have used it every day for a year or so and mostly it's been great. Call me old fashioned, but the feature creep and massive PRs with unreviewable binary blobs in the repo are concerning.
It's already a terminal multiplexer, wasm extension host, and webserver. What problem is being solved by bundling in yet another vibed terminal emulator?
I feel similarly. I jumped on because I prefer applications in languages that I know (and could potentially contribute to) and was experiencing some intermittent and difficult-to-reproduce crashes in tmux (that I assumed were memory safety bugs). But now it seems with each release there are a dozen new features that I don't have time to explore but have potential to impact the long-term health of the project.
Also the keybinding collisions with helix are frustrating -- highly configurable but takes some effort to get sorted and nixified.
This project was created in the pre-AI era. It's been running for 6 years. Most of the features have been on the roadmap for a while now. This isn't vibe-coded.
The terminal appears to be based on Alacritty: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/blob/c8585459c37186fae1...
I saw that too. It's a [dev-dependency], so perhaps used for testing?
I tried to compare the source but didn't find any similarity, not even in the source file structure. The style is distinct. For example, Alacritty's source code is commented, Zellij-terminal's source is not.
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Having Zellij _also_ be a first-class terminal emulator is ridiculously cool. I have so much muscle-memory in tmux+zsh/fish, but on Windows, Zellij + Nushell is such a life-saver, I'm considering putting in the effort to switch.
> but on Windows, Zellij + Nushell is such a life-saver
Are you using Nushell as your primary shell? I like it for scripts, but I don't think I'd be able to drop Fish for it.
Fish doesn't run on Windows unless you're in WSL. In WSL I'm running fish, to be sure, but I prefer nu to PowerShell when I have to navigate the Windows host. Windows is required for my work, BTW - For the record I infinitely prefer Linux/macOS.
Any reason why you prefer nu over PowerShell? Especially considering they they're both similar and PowerShell really shines on Windows?
These are personal (not necessarily technical) reasons, but nu is Rust/community-driven as opposed to C#/Microsoft. I can see myself using nu in more contexts than just my Windows box (yes, I know that PowerShell runs on other platforms as well).
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> Fish doesn't run on Windows unless you're in WSL.
Ah I didn't know that. TIL!
Look at the performance, it's faster than Ghosty