Stupid_youtube

..or maybe stupid me. When I saw stuff like ‘The tmux-killer!’; ‘The tmux alternative.. first impressions’.. I tried it.

And within a week I had the TV-shop regrets. Sure.. it can slice and dice. It can even make fancy spirals from potato. But it’s NOT THAT GREAT. It’s a.. half-baked demo.

What you get is tabs, panes in layouts. You can bind keys to a limited set of commands (not guaranteed to run in any particular order). You got a template system for layouts that forces you to rewrite the templates for every layout (templates can’t be imported). Key ‘r’ renames tab i Tab-mode (Ctrl-t). To rename a Pane, you go to Pane-mode (Ctrl-p) and type ‘c’.. because ‘r’ is busy meaning: Create Pane to the ‘right’.

I don’t use micro editor much.. but when you do, it quits with Ctrl-q. So does zellij. So, you need to type: Ctrl-g (lock) Ctrl-q (quit micro) Ctrl-g (unlock).

It’s so blatant! Thinking: “I will use Ctrl-q to quit.. because that will not interfere with anything!”

OK.. sounds like I hate Zellij now. Not true. Basically I think its not finished (by far).. and it’s certainly NOT a tmux-killer.

UPDATE: 2025-07-10
Read through the above.. and think it comes across sounding a bit.. Well, like Zellij is not usable or functioning. What is there is mostly working.. and what is there is a big part of the foundation of a multiplexer.

Tabs, Panes, Layouts, a swap-layout system, Keybindings, a layout-template system, many Actions.

With some sort of tmux display -a | grep info, you would have the ability to perform actions on conditions in the language of your choice. You can pipe a plugin.. but you can’t pipe the server.