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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Because it's not immediately obvious, Zellij is a terminal multiplexer like tmux or GNU screen, whose distinguishing feature is that it comes with more built-in functionality, has a more discoverable UI, and a more opinionated/modern default configuration while still being highly customizable (as demonstrated in the OP).

https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij

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HOT DAMN! Over the last few weeks I've wished almost daily I was proficient in tmux, but it's annoying to get started in because you have to look up EVERYTHING. I just tried Zellij (they have a "try without installing" command on their website) and it's exactly what I wanted Termux to be. Thank you so much for this comment!

Indeed, for someone new to terminal multiplexing, its the superior UX, its just missing some advanced things tmux does, but which are being worked on

Would you mind giving an example of what you're thinking of?

Too bad it isn't a drop in replacement for tmux because of memory usage. There are memory leaks and even without that the base memory uses is a couple hundred megabytes. Tmux on the other hand, consumes only tens of megabytes of memory.

Hey, there are no memory leaks that I'm aware of (there were a few, but we plugged them in recent months). If you know differently, I'd appreciate an issue report.

If you run e.g. btop or bpytop in a separate zellij tab, zellij will eventually gobble up all your memory and die.

In the beginning I wa very entusiastic and switched from tmux to zellij on remote machines, but as I usually have btop running in a tab it would die in a day or two, so now I'm back to using tmux on remote machines and reserve zellij for local (and make sure I don't run btop in a tab).

I'm like 90% sure this was fixed - if you'd be willing to try with a recent Zellij version, that would be great.

Otherwise, I'll try your reproduction myself and will fix if I can reproduce. Thanks.

I'm now running v0.37.2 on a remote machine with 3 tabs: a shell, syslog spooled by lnav, and btop. To me it looks like it grows by 2 kB RAM every minute. I am logging to a file with timestamps, and we will see the results tomorrow.

In the course of less than 12 hours zellij grew from 93 MB to 1227 MB in roughly 2 kB increments per minute. Closing the tab running btop will release the stolen memory.

I will append a comment to the Microsoft GitHub issue mentioned above a little later.

Thanks! If you could also specify how you measured it and attach some debug logs (there are instructions in the issue template) that would be great. Because my instance has run overnight without issue and I'd love to be able to reproduce this.

I entered a comment ( https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/1625#issuecommen... ) before I read your comment here. Please let me know if that is sufficient.

(Does HN have an indentation limit, I can't seem to reply to imsnif…)

I'm always running the latest zellij, but I'll start btop in a tab right away and see what happens.

I did mention it in https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/1625#issuecommen... and noticed the issue is still open, so I haven't tried btop in zellij since v0.36.0.

Keeping track is hard sometimes, I saw it again in the issue as you mentioned. :)

Yeah, and it does flicker a bit etc.

But I still use it all the time now — I found it so much easier to get up to speed with relative to tmux. And it's getting better all the time, so I'm happy to invest in it...

Yeah and sudden unexplained crashed made me stop using

Leaks like crazy on macOS.

For WebAssembly plugins, I also wish they used Extism, which is kinda the de facto standard for this.

I just tried it out and it apparently highjacks normal command-line editing shortcuts like ctrl-n, ctrl-p, ctrl-h, etc.

Its not tmux, are you sure you're engaging its binding which enables/disables its binding map, I belive Ctrl+G IIRC, unlike tmux which prefixes its bindings with a customizable chord

I see that now, but then you can’t use the buffer navigation hotkeys. I’ll just stick with tmux.

With no support for Windows

Works great in WSL in windows terminal....

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