I use zellij for about a month now. I never used a terminal multiplexer before (I tried tmux but I was really confused by it). It's incredibly easy to use and user friendly, I didn't even have to learn anything with the default help bar at the bottom, and muscle memory did the rest. A real game changer for me, and I wouldn't do without it now!
Yoo, you perfectly timed this with the new release of zellij that happened 2 hours ago! I personally love zellij for how beginner friendly it is to use
Zellij is rad. It's hard to compete with Tmux because it has SO MANY FEATURES, but I installed Zellij because in my 5-year-old laptop, Tmux slowed my terminal use significantly. Zellij was much faster, and its user experience, while more visually noisy, is learned far easier, since everything is labeled. The Zellij blog is also great, it explains the discovery and implementation process.
Excellent video! I'm a terminal editor kinda person (helix right now) and many other term managers are pretty heavy. Zellij is nice and fast ... low resource usage. Love it. The only issue I have found is some weirdness in mouse-copy-n-paste to the system clipboard. (Pop!_OS Gnome term). There are workarounds ... certainly won't stop me :) Thanks for the demo!
My first impression when I heard about Zellij was "Why not just use tmux?" But then, it's 2023 and getting true color to work in tmux+nvim is still a nightmare, and writing up preconfigured tmux sessions is a mess. I say, we've come a long way in the last couple of decades. I don't mind tools like nushell and zellij trying to sand down some of the rough edges of what came before, instead of just sticking with 30 year old software because "they work well enough, when you get used to them".
I spend 99% of my time in the terminal, never really used multiplexers other than backgrounding a running task using screen, I'm planning on giving Zellij a shot soon, as it looks awesome. :)
I've had my eyes on this project for a while. Looks like it's come a looooooong way since I last saw it. Really excited about this project. Thanks for sharing, Chris!
Zellij is such an awesome piece of software. I've tried tmux before, but it seems a bit complicated. I will try to stick with zellij for a few weeks or months :)
The major issue i found with Zellij is about keybinds, default one will overwrite bash shell, ctrl+o, ctrl+p for example are reserved in bash for applying command without deleting line and go to previous command.
You can lock the interface with C-g, but I hear you on the defaults being a bit conflicting as I also navigate with readline bindings quite often. Luckily, all of the key bindings are configurable.
Your videos are so well done! I love how much you’ve been working on them! This video was super informative on zellij, and as a person who has used tmux but wanted to dive into another solution this came at a perfect time. I loved the overview and dive into some functionality. I also loved how you ended it with the concept of plugins because that was like reading my mind! As always top tier content Chris. Keep them coming!
I feel like I haven't needed any sort of terminal pane thingy since I've been programming. A while ago I learned tmux and it was cool but I also completely ditched it for just VSCode and it's terminal. Will say this seems super fully featured and definitely impressive. Also it's worth calling out that those panels just look sexy, if I had that open all the time it would definitely make me feel smarter
That was an amazing demo, this looks very promosing. Last time I checked this project it wasn't very stable yet, have to give another go now defintley. Really would like to ditch tmux eventually
i learned tmux, but i always came back to the windows terminal default. Yesterday i learned about zellij from Boilerplate, love it. Currently i have 3 tabs. 1 for ecmas and orgfiles, 1 for gitui and 1 for lunarvim Best part, my transparent terminal stays transparent, its the small things^-^
Been trying Zellij for about a week and I can't like it more. Tmux is nice but trying to scroll or copy contents was very weird to me. Zellij does it in a better more natural way. Now I'm looking for ways to have a custom layout with everything I usually need and use in my terminal.
I was amazed for a while until I started noticing very irritating design decisions. I mean on the video, I haven't tried it at home. It grabs too many keys, for me tmux is already too much when it grabs Ctrl+b. Zellij grabs multiple including Ctrl+p which is an odd choice. The configuration file seems to be tailored for this program which I don't understand. It's similar enough to JSON but not enough that it can be parsed with many different tools. The IDE-like setup in the end looks amazing and 2 years ago it would have been jaw dropping for me. I was trying to make an IDE out of terminals and a TWM and that's what drove me to Linux in the first place. But, can you have tab like behavior for the bottom terminal? Can you easily replace one of the 2 main frames in the middle with some other terminal, and revert them again? Overall I don't buy the premise of good first experience. Good first experiences leave you alone after the thrill is gone. Tmux really isn't that bad. Do you use Zellij? I imagine you have to install on the remote machine the plugins but that would have been the case anyway so it's not a big deal.
I wanted to like it, and maybe it was just issues with using MobaXterm as my ssh client, but nothing seemed to work right with Zellij. Backspace didn't backspace. My mouse scroll wheel no longer scrolled up, instead it did the same thing as up and down keyboard arrows cycling through commands. If I tried to use my mouse to highlight text on the screen so I could copy and past it, everything just went bonkers and the different panes started switching from side to side to top to bottom and was just redic. I'll stick to MobaXterm split-pane for now.
My main problem with terminal multiplexers is that my nvim bindings tend to overlap the multiplexer's bindings. Is there a convenient workaround to that? Also, is a terminal multiplexer really useful in addition to a WM such as i3?
Zellij has Control-g to lock the zellij interface, which you can bind to whatever you want if you find yourself locking a lot. if you're using i3 maybe not since i3 is pretty advanced! It really depends on your workflow. For example if you wanted a workspace multiple people on your team could boot up on multiple operating systems, zellij might be a better choice.
@@chrisbiscardi indeed, every time I have to work on windows/mac os, Icry because I cannot use I3. Maybe it will be worth a shot in that case. Thank's for the answer!
I haven't seen wezterm, thanks for mentioning it. It looks like it's an emulator and a multiplexer so it would replace something like alacritty or iterm too?
The theme is based on the nightowl theme by sarah drasner which is what I use everywhere: github.com/sdras/night-owl-vscode-theme themes { nightowl { fg "#d6deeb" bg "#011627" black "#575656" red "#EF5350" green "#22da6e" yellow "#ffeb95" blue "#82AAFF" magenta "#C792EA" cyan "#7fdbca" white "#ffffff" orange "#D08770" } }
doing well thanks for asking! How are you? I'm doing some stuff behind the scenes yeah :) The wasm video series is also taking longer to produce, so I've been supplementing with shorts to keep myself in the rhythm of shipping.
@@artemivasyuk1699 glad to hear that! yeah I'm on the Bevy release. Tomorrow if I get what I need to done today. I was working on the zellij video for their 0.35 release today so I'm a smidge behind on the bevy video.
I've already watched this twice and am not exactly sure why I'd move from tmux. I'm all for the hot new thing and wadm plugins but I'm not sure i want floating panes. Probably i need to watch again when I'm not befuddled by a fever. Does it have an option to hide its key bindings behind a trigger (like ctrl-b in tmux) to avoid conflicting with keys in, say a terminal text editor.
I feel like this might be popular for people who have never used tmux or screen. It seems to be more discoverable for the new user. I know when I first learned tmux I ended up keeping a cheatsheet on my other monitor most of the time until I memorized the shortcuts.
until today, used tmux. I used terminal windows for log monitor and htop sessions. zellij looks like a more capable tmux and a re-usable config file #ftw!
This is interesting, though I find this kind of thing largely redundant. Why should anyone spend time learning a new way to interact with windows, when if they wanted a tiling window manager, they're probably already using one.
Perhaps, and there is an argument to be made that a lot of similar functionality already exists in iterm2 for example. But if you're using a minimal terminal like alacritty, or if you're running commands on remote servers, you might not have the same access to those applications features. Being able to script and externally interact with a running session or programmatically control/store workspace layouts are also nice benefits. I use yabai, but yabai doesn't let me detach and reattach to workspace sessions, which would help keep my ever growing number of desktops down for sure.
I use zellij for about a month now. I never used a terminal multiplexer before (I tried tmux but I was really confused by it). It's incredibly easy to use and user friendly, I didn't even have to learn anything with the default help bar at the bottom, and muscle memory did the rest. A real game changer for me, and I wouldn't do without it now!
How do you scroll up or down? The usual Shift+Page up/down used on Konsole don't seem to work
@@turanamo Ctrl+s then either the Up/Down keys or j/k to go down/up one line at a time or either Left/Right or h/l to go down/up one screen at a time.
@@LudoTechWorld ah thanks 🙏 mate
Yoo, you perfectly timed this with the new release of zellij that happened 2 hours ago! I personally love zellij for how beginner friendly it is to use
Definitely intentional matching it up with the release!
Zellij is rad. It's hard to compete with Tmux because it has SO MANY FEATURES, but I installed Zellij because in my 5-year-old laptop, Tmux slowed my terminal use significantly. Zellij was much faster, and its user experience, while more visually noisy, is learned far easier, since everything is labeled. The Zellij blog is also great, it explains the discovery and implementation process.
There are excellent ways to reduce the 'noise' you mention with some config
Excellent video! I'm a terminal editor kinda person (helix right now) and many other term managers are pretty heavy. Zellij is nice and fast ... low resource usage. Love it. The only issue I have found is some weirdness in mouse-copy-n-paste to the system clipboard. (Pop!_OS Gnome term). There are workarounds ... certainly won't stop me :) Thanks for the demo!
My first impression when I heard about Zellij was "Why not just use tmux?"
But then, it's 2023 and getting true color to work in tmux+nvim is still a nightmare, and writing up preconfigured tmux sessions is a mess. I say, we've come a long way in the last couple of decades. I don't mind tools like nushell and zellij trying to sand down some of the rough edges of what came before, instead of just sticking with 30 year old software because "they work well enough, when you get used to them".
This is so true
**cries in wrong colored tmuxinator config files**
I was using old GNU screen for ages, and was extremely happy when I learned about Zellij a couple of weeks ago 😍
Two months into Zellij. Creating layouts is top feature. I hope we will have option to save layout inside opened session.
Top video!
I just switched from tmux to Zellij last week and so far I love it. Great introduction here!
I spend 99% of my time in the terminal, never really used multiplexers other than backgrounding a running task using screen, I'm planning on giving Zellij a shot soon, as it looks awesome. :)
I've had my eyes on this project for a while. Looks like it's come a looooooong way since I last saw it. Really excited about this project. Thanks for sharing, Chris!
So cool! I’ve been so fatigued with learning new tools lately but Zellij might be awesome enough to get me to try it
Zellij is such an awesome piece of software. I've tried tmux before, but it seems a bit complicated. I will try to stick with zellij for a few weeks or months :)
I found configuring Zellij to be a little challenging would love a tutorial on it. But by far, this is the easiest terminal multiplexer I've ever used
As a lightweight tmux user, it looks pretty cool to me. Will going to have a try in my daily work.
The major issue i found with Zellij is about keybinds, default one will overwrite bash shell, ctrl+o, ctrl+p for example are reserved in bash for applying command without deleting line and go to previous command.
You can lock the interface with C-g, but I hear you on the defaults being a bit conflicting as I also navigate with readline bindings quite often. Luckily, all of the key bindings are configurable.
I do 100% of my development in terminal.
I have been using tmux for 3 years but will try this one out.
Your videos are so well done! I love how much you’ve been working on them! This video was super informative on zellij, and as a person who has used tmux but wanted to dive into another solution this came at a perfect time. I loved the overview and dive into some functionality. I also loved how you ended it with the concept of plugins because that was like reading my mind! As always top tier content Chris. Keep them coming!
I feel like I haven't needed any sort of terminal pane thingy since I've been programming. A while ago I learned tmux and it was cool but I also completely ditched it for just VSCode and it's terminal. Will say this seems super fully featured and definitely impressive. Also it's worth calling out that those panels just look sexy, if I had that open all the time it would definitely make me feel smarter
This looks million times better than Screen.
well done tutorial on zellij, thank you
That was an amazing demo, this looks very promosing. Last time I checked this project it wasn't very stable yet, have to give another go now defintley.
Really would like to ditch tmux eventually
i learned tmux, but i always came back to the windows terminal default.
Yesterday i learned about zellij from Boilerplate, love it.
Currently i have 3 tabs.
1 for ecmas and orgfiles, 1 for gitui and 1 for lunarvim
Best part, my transparent terminal stays transparent, its the small things^-^
Wow, this is really cool. Might have to give it a try!
Been trying Zellij for about a week and I can't like it more.
Tmux is nice but trying to scroll or copy contents was very weird to me. Zellij does it in a better more natural way.
Now I'm looking for ways to have a custom layout with everything I usually need and use in my terminal.
I use zellij all the time! I can see myself using it less once helix supports virtual term
Could zellij distinguish ctrl-i and tab？
any `save/restore session` feature or plugin? that's so important to me.
seems to me what zellij is doing is what I do with my terminal emulator anyways, but maybe for remote sessions... I'll definitely give it a try
I was amazed for a while until I started noticing very irritating design decisions. I mean on the video, I haven't tried it at home.
It grabs too many keys, for me tmux is already too much when it grabs Ctrl+b. Zellij grabs multiple including Ctrl+p which is an odd choice.
The configuration file seems to be tailored for this program which I don't understand. It's similar enough to JSON but not enough that it can be parsed with many different tools.
The IDE-like setup in the end looks amazing and 2 years ago it would have been jaw dropping for me. I was trying to make an IDE out of terminals and a TWM and that's what drove me to Linux in the first place. But, can you have tab like behavior for the bottom terminal? Can you easily replace one of the 2 main frames in the middle with some other terminal, and revert them again?
Overall I don't buy the premise of good first experience. Good first experiences leave you alone after the thrill is gone. Tmux really isn't that bad.
Do you use Zellij? I imagine you have to install on the remote machine the plugins but that would have been the case anyway so it's not a big deal.
I wanted to like it, and maybe it was just issues with using MobaXterm as my ssh client, but nothing seemed to work right with Zellij. Backspace didn't backspace. My mouse scroll wheel no longer scrolled up, instead it did the same thing as up and down keyboard arrows cycling through commands. If I tried to use my mouse to highlight text on the screen so I could copy and past it, everything just went bonkers and the different panes started switching from side to side to top to bottom and was just redic. I'll stick to MobaXterm split-pane for now.
I just started playing with Zellij, still haven’t figured out how to use Strider correctly yet…
My main problem with terminal multiplexers is that my nvim bindings tend to overlap the multiplexer's bindings. Is there a convenient workaround to that?
Also, is a terminal multiplexer really useful in addition to a WM such as i3?
Zellij has Control-g to lock the zellij interface, which you can bind to whatever you want if you find yourself locking a lot.
if you're using i3 maybe not since i3 is pretty advanced! It really depends on your workflow. For example if you wanted a workspace multiple people on your team could boot up on multiple operating systems, zellij might be a better choice.
@@chrisbiscardi indeed, every time I have to work on windows/mac os, Icry because I cannot use I3. Maybe it will be worth a shot in that case.
Thank's for the answer!
Zellij can detach and attach to a session. How to restore a session after reboot.
this is a great tool
What's the program running in Pane #2?
that's bottom: github.com/ClementTsang/bottom
I wonder if this makes alacritty usable without a WM
Looking into WezTerm vs Zellij vs Tmux. (Long time Tmux user there)
I haven't seen wezterm, thanks for mentioning it. It looks like it's an emulator and a multiplexer so it would replace something like alacritty or iterm too?
Isn't that just like tmux?
It's an alternative to tmux, yes.
@@chrisbiscardi I see
I'm pretty used to tmux so I'll keep using it instead
can we get your zellij config especially the theme it's so cool
The theme is based on the nightowl theme by sarah drasner which is what I use everywhere: github.com/sdras/night-owl-vscode-theme
themes {
nightowl {
fg "#d6deeb"
bg "#011627"
black "#575656"
red "#EF5350"
green "#22da6e"
yellow "#ffeb95"
blue "#82AAFF"
magenta "#C792EA"
cyan "#7fdbca"
white "#ffffff"
orange "#D08770"
}
}
Hey Chris! How are you? Haven’t seen new content from you except shorts. Making something big?
doing well thanks for asking! How are you?
I'm doing some stuff behind the scenes yeah :) The wasm video series is also taking longer to produce, so I've been supplementing with shorts to keep myself in the rhythm of shipping.
@@chrisbiscardi I'm fine. No missile attacks for quite a while.
There's new version of bevy. Are you planning to check it?
@@artemivasyuk1699 glad to hear that!
yeah I'm on the Bevy release. Tomorrow if I get what I need to done today. I was working on the zellij video for their 0.35 release today so I'm a smidge behind on the bevy video.
What window manager is this?...
yabai would be the window manager
I've already watched this twice and am not exactly sure why I'd move from tmux. I'm all for the hot new thing and wadm plugins but I'm not sure i want floating panes.
Probably i need to watch again when I'm not befuddled by a fever.
Does it have an option to hide its key bindings behind a trigger (like ctrl-b in tmux) to avoid conflicting with keys in, say a terminal text editor.
I feel like this might be popular for people who have never used tmux or screen. It seems to be more discoverable for the new user. I know when I first learned tmux I ended up keeping a cheatsheet on my other monitor most of the time until I memorized the shortcuts.
Yeah, C-g will lock the interface and you could bind that to whatever you wanted as usual.
@@chrisbiscardi oh, that's cool. That's a nice way to do it
I will test it because of KDL files. Hope it does not conflict with my Vim setup 🎉
until today, used tmux.
I used terminal windows for log monitor and htop sessions.
zellij looks like a more capable tmux and a re-usable config file #ftw!
I am considering/ as a dev and tmx user
So far works way better than tmux in alacritty
This is interesting, though I find this kind of thing largely redundant. Why should anyone spend time learning a new way to interact with windows, when if they wanted a tiling window manager, they're probably already using one.
Perhaps, and there is an argument to be made that a lot of similar functionality already exists in iterm2 for example.
But if you're using a minimal terminal like alacritty, or if you're running commands on remote servers, you might not have the same access to those applications features.
Being able to script and externally interact with a running session or programmatically control/store workspace layouts are also nice benefits.
I use yabai, but yabai doesn't let me detach and reattach to workspace sessions, which would help keep my ever growing number of desktops down for sure.
LOL run zellij inside tmux is meta