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Comment by imsnif | Hacker News Reader

You can lock the interface with ctrl-g and then all keys pass through.

See that's also interesting, thanks for the heads up. I saw "lock" previously and pressed it, and it did something besides what I expected. When I think lock, I think it's literally locking the interface in some way so someone can't interact with the software, including myself unintentionally. That's what it means in Windows, MacOS, and even tmux. I would consider just starting out "locked" but change the paradigm. It's not locked, it's just that the menu isn't active. "Unlocking" now becomes enabling the menu/interface - until you disable the menu.

Keybindings are a hard problem. Doubly so when you're a wrapper that has to also not collide with everyone else's keybindings. :)

The idea was that users should spend most of their time in "normal" mode, deferring to "locked" mode only for cases like you mentioned (ctrl-r in bash or in vim). The modal ergonomics are built on that.

I'd ideally like to find one word that describes locked mode better than "locked", which I agree is not ideal. I spent quite some time thinking about it and asking others, but most of us are not native English speakers - so maybe there's something obvious we're missing. :)

Wouldn't the word "passthrough" be the right word for this feature?

That's a cool idea! I'll run it by some old/new users, see how they react. Thanks!

ctlr+r is a very heavily used shortcut for some people. Perhaps that can be configurable?

All of the shortcuts are configurable: https://zellij.dev/documentation/keybindings.html

I think ctrl r is used frequent enough to warrant a single keychord instead of having to chain though.

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