Zellij – a friendlier tmux or screen in rust | Hacker News Reader

Zellij – a friendlier tmux or screen in rust

zellij.dev

62 pointssynergy2021 comments

Hooooooly cow. Those on-screen hints are amazing. I've never learned tmux commands, and this reminds me of everything I liked about `nano`.

I might rebind my i3 keys to match these bindings somehow.

+100

Discoverability is very underrated

I love it, because I automatically learn the commands after a while. But I learn way fewer commands when I have to look them up.

I have a 100+ line config file for rebinding tmux keys. Very much prefer it over screen but the defaults are terribly unintuitive.

This looks nice, but I'm already extremely satisfied with byobu.

Also, I couldn't care less that it's written in rust, I don't know why "in rust" is still a thing.

Given that this is Hacker News, people might be interested in the implementation.

Memory safety is a big thing right now, and that’s one of the big draws for rust. Not sure that’s a big selling point for this program in particular unless you’re just a fan of rust, but it’s why you’re seeing a lot of things point out their conversion to rust.

How does that matter to a terminal multiplexer?

Zellij just made the front page a few weeks ago for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26902430

I'm only a casual user of tmux (and its iterm2 integration). Besides plugins, I'm not really sure from the website how this is a better ("friendlier") option. Anyone?

It has the keyboard shortcuts right there on the screen so you don't have to remember them. This is very useful for people like me who can never learn them no matter how many years we use the software. The use of [] and hjkl for moving around is less friendly though, I can use the more intuitive arrow keys with tmux, this isn't the 80s anymore, the arrow keys work well in any modern terminal emulator. Also the square brackets keys only work well in English keyboards.

With tmux the leader key (default ^b) followed by '?' will show you the keyboard shortcuts. There are few shortcuts that are so common that I want them on my screen all the time, but uncommon enough I don't have them memorized...

> With tmux the leader key (default ^b) followed by '?'

I used to know that, thanks, but you aren't the first person to point that to me and won't be the last. My memory is really bad and by the time I have to use that again I will forget that it exists. For someone like me a command like that has to be visible on the screen at all times, I can't nemorize things no matter how much I try.

To summarize, my problem isn't just that I forget that X action's shortcut, it is that I forget that X can be done and that also prevents me from searching "how to do X with tmux" because I don't even remember X.

hjkl is not about the 80s, it’s about efficiency. You don’t need to move your hand anywhere from the home position.

I prefer it to be intuitive rather than save half a second pressing keys (and then lose it because I forget which one goes up and which down). It would be better to have both ways for the two kinds of people.

I didn't know it was for efficiency, thanks for explaining that. I have always been so inefficient with it that I thought it was just a remnant from the 80s.

Actually even in Vim you can use arrow keys for navigation in addition to hjkl, so I agree with you.

Looks nice, but I'm going to have a hard time remembering that name, and it's much harder to type than tmux :)

alias tmux=zellij?

Its useless for me without the ability to copy paste via keyboard. i.e. tmux's `ctrl b + ctrl [`

This has got to be one of the killer features of tmux.

Can you scroll in zellij panes?

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