Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included

by ndr • 8 months ago

66 61 8 months ago

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

sesm3• 8 months ago

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?

pomdtr• 8 months ago

I built a project to add a terminal emulator to the browser (using a chrome extension): https://github.com/pomdtr/tweety.

I'm working on a `tweety edit` command which open arbitrary files in your $EDITOR of choice in a new tab.

sesm3• 8 months ago

Looks great, I'll give it a try!

maccard2• 8 months ago

You’ve basically described vscode!

sesm3• 8 months ago

As far as I understand, VSCode browser can't install browser extensions and doesn't even have Dev Tools. For example, IntelliJ IDEs ship with CEF-based browser that has Chromium Dev Tools, but it still doesn't support browser extensions.

tdubey• 8 months ago

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...

whimsicalism• 8 months ago

i've switched over and really enjoy it. i feel like it's largely self documenting, what are your biggest hurdles?

stusmall• 8 months ago

For something as simple as a terminal multiplexer, if you aren't seeing immediate value in a switch maybe its fine if you stick with what you have. You don't always need to be on the newest thing. I prefer zellij over tmux, but it is evolutionary not revolutionary. Instead of forcing yourself, save the effort and focus on something more valuable.

Enzime• 8 months ago

I recently realized that tmux’s bindings still work inside Zellij so I’ve just been using tmux bindings and haven’t had to adjust at all

kartoshechka• 8 months ago

I was confused by its plugins. Despite reading docs over a few days I still have no idea what does runtime for plugins look like, does zellij download them once? on each server start? on each plugin call? and since some features like a switching to a session from another session without spawning child zellij process is available only as plugin, that adds up the confusion, like am I hitting github every time when I switch sessions?

I didn't manage to find a way to update existing session layout when the layout config changed, only to recreate it, which is super boresome when you tinkering with plugin config that is embedded in layout config.

Resurrected sessions needs to be restored manually via somewhat lagging session manager, there's no cli api for that, in general when you need something to be done in another session, you can't.

The only good built-in feature I found is stacking layout showing running command in pane, but I delegate it to tabs in niri now.

Overall I would say if you're long time tmux user, switching to zellij isn't worth it. If you're new to concept of terminal emulators, zellij is much more friendlier, and I'm sure plugins would mature, docs would improve.

not-so-darkstar5• 8 months ago

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).

hollerith2• 8 months ago

I don't even use a terminal to run shell commands.

not-so-darkstar5• 8 months ago

Another fellow GVim user?

mistercheph• 8 months ago

Keyboards are higher bandwidth man-machine interfaces than mouse + GUI unless what you're exchanging is spatial information, which is typically not the case for writing software.

There is a higher learning curve, and we can argue about the tradeoffs you make, but some powerful tools can be difficult to learn to use. Complexity != bad design; sometimes you're just exposing an underlying problem space that can't be simplified without being cut off from part of the solution space.

grepex• 8 months ago

This 100%. For me, the philosophy is not so much a terminal-centric design but a keyboard-centric design. Sure, this could be done in a GUI, but even GUIs with a keyboard-centric design are not as fluid as a TUI.

I'll also add that (like the parent comment) I did not get the appeal. Not until I forced myself to use it more and saw the benefits.

not-so-darkstar5• 8 months ago

I didn't understand much of you said but it sounded mathy so I'm going to reply with a counterexample, just look up on youtube Russ Cox solving AoC with Acme and tell me that's not impressive!

By the way, using a GUI doesn't automatically using the mouse for everything, think of GVim or Emacs. the problem with terminal emulators is the emulating part, where they are forced to comply with the idiotic rules from the '70s.

homebrewer3• 8 months ago

I use IDEA for most things and barely touch the mouse. It has its problems (like terrible performance), but it's a good example of a GUI done right.

Everything can be controlled through the keyboard, typing into every window does fuzzy search of its contents (and that window might contain a list of code symbols, a list of database tables, a list of search results, or many other things).

Every action can be bound to a key combo of your choice. Every interaction with the GUI can be stored as a macro, edited and replayed.

And so on, and so forth.

chrysoprace2• 8 months ago

GUIs are often mouse-centric, resource-hungry.

TUIs and CLIs are often keyboard centric only use as many resources as it takes to do the task, and then minimal resources to draw the text. Most CLIs also follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, so you can get an output from a CLI and then pipe it into another.

At work I literally use the same workflow at home across two different operating systems because they both share a terminal. I don't even know how to switch workspace on a Mac because I don't need to, tmux sessions fulfil the same task.

Barrin92• 8 months ago

Most CLIs also follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well,

basi cli tools yes, but software like the one we're commenting on has a TUI so complex they simply emulate graphical user environments and widgets but on a text rendering stack, akin to web apps pretending to be graphical applications on top of a markup language, except they do it out of necessity because that's how the web works.

If you want to draw graphical user interfaces on an operating system just use the... actual graphics stack. There's terminal apps with widget frameworks now that painstakingly try to reproduce what every OS ships with just because it's.. cool to be a terminal hacker or something?

tomtomtom777• 8 months ago

It's quite often useful to have multiple tabs or panes in your terminal. Zellij does this. It's a terminal multiplexer, like tmux. Mostly just a bit more beginner-friendly and polished.

So obviously it's terminal-centric.

dr_kretyn3• 8 months ago

Extremes are on both ends. Some people want to use a terminal for all, some don't want a terminal at all.

I'm a terminal guy because most UI I use is just unintuitive and requires a lot of mouse clicking - using mouse is just inconvenient to me. And often there are no tools for what I want to do, or rather, I'd need to open many tools to do something simple like change a file on a remote machine.

But I like a nice IDE, I use DB explorers, I use cloud code to write GUI for data processing and reporting visuals. Terminal is just a "killer app" that's useful for almost everything. So, if you're using regardless, why not make the experience better?

not-so-darkstar5• 8 months ago

I don't think terminal multiplexers (even Zellij which claims not to be one) make the experience better. They make it worse, actually, because when you have a problem there's one more thing to keep track of: Your terminal emulator, your terminal multiplexer and your TUI.

A decent terminal emulator like kitty solves all of this.

klooney• 8 months ago

The author's father agrees with you, which is pretty funny.

ghusto• 8 months ago

For me it's because it's because most things are faster, easier, and don't change (what you learn retains it's value, and doesn't become worthless when the new hotness arrives). So for me it's the other way around; everything should be in the terminal, with a GUI for that one time you need it (`open .` on Mac to open Finder).

not-so-darkstar5• 8 months ago

With all the new CLI tools it looks like the opposite to me. For example the ag, ack, rg history.

VS Code still has the same style from 2018.

aaplok• 8 months ago

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.

Is this not somewhat self-contradictory? Having the terminal in the editor or having the editor in the terminal are both about having one tool that rules the others. The only difference is which one you choose to be the ruler.

dr_kretyn3• 8 months ago

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?

chrysoprace2• 8 months ago

It's not an alternative to kitty; it's an alternative to tmux or GNU screen.

I believe it's positioned to be more user-friendly than tmux but I've already got things memorised with tmux and it wasn't bringing anything new to the table, so I didn't try zellij for more than a few days.

pletnes• 8 months ago

I like tmux better as well (muscle memory) but AFAIK you need tmuxinator for preconfiguring layouts?

tym0• 8 months ago

I feel the same. If someone would ask me for a recommendation I would point them toward Zellij but if you've been using tmux for years it's probably not worth it.

The modal nature of Zellij is nice though.

Milpotel2• 8 months ago

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

Rucadi• 8 months ago

If the source is known, it is not less bad that downloading a program and running it

homebrewer3• 8 months ago

It is if the script is written badly, gets truncated while it's being downloaded, and fails to account for this possibility.

Look into tailscale's installation script, they wrapped everything into a function which is called in the last line — you either download and execute every line, or it does nothing.

Milpotel2• 8 months ago

That's quite uncommon. Typically your distribution checks that the downloaded source/binary has the correct checksum and an experienced maintainer checked the (sandboxed) installation. Here someone puts an arbitrary script online that runs with your user's permission and you hope that the web page is not hijacked and some arbitrary dev knows how to write bash scripts.

quantummagic• 8 months ago

It's just assumed you'll run it in an isolated container, or some other sandbox...

jbverschoor• 8 months ago

Sandbox container time https://github.com/jrz/container-shell

mutkach• 8 months ago

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

chb• 8 months ago

Ha! I've been using tmux for years and I didn't realize one could do this.

kstrauser• 8 months ago

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.

andyfleming• 8 months ago

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

mixmastamyk• 8 months ago

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.

mhitza• 8 months ago

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.

_lvbh• 8 months ago

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.

welcome_dragon• 8 months ago

This is finally a terminal that gets panels and tabs right. Gonna try it without tmux

Escapade5160• 8 months ago

Went to the homepage, had no idea what it was. Read the about page, I still don't know that it does.

Can anyone tell me what this is and why it might be useful?

SAI_Peregrinus• 8 months ago

It's a terminal multiplexer. A bit like tmux, but with a better (IMO) UI.

nurettin• 8 months ago

The about page says that it is a terminal multiplexer. Like gnu screen and that hipster version called tmux.

Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included

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