alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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100%. Tmux didn’t click for me but Zellij did within 5 minutes. Lifelong Vim user so it felt a lot more familiar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If anyone is looking for a slightly higher level management of persistent sessions, we just launched https://haventerminal.com for Mac
I prefer smux.dev
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....)