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Comment by pzmarzly | Hacker News Reader

From the perspective of "a regular user" (which is a bad term, because of course I see myself as the norm), I don't care if multiplexer is part of terminal app or not, but I do care about it reacting to my clicks. I don't want to learn obscure multi-step keyboard shortcuts in order to open a new tab, rename a tab, resize a pane, reorder tabs, copy the scrollback buffer, etc.

Sadly, that seems to leave me with only 2 options that work well over SSH:

- using a terminal with client-server model and built-in multiplexer (VSCode Remote SSH extension, WezTerm)

- using iTerm2 with tmux integration (apparently nothing else implements tmux control protocol https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/280829)

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you might want to give Zellij a try. (https://zellij.dev/) Works like tmux but with the UI friendliness of more modern apps.

Okay, just going through the first tutorial[0], I am convinced that Zellij is truly something else. I've never opened up my wallet[1] so quickly for any open-source project, but here the author is clearly creating something amazing (and maintaining awesome documentation and tutorials!). Thank you a lot for this recommendation :D

BTW this is the first time I've seen a working drag and drop TUI (you can use drag-and-drop to move floating panes around).

[0] https://zellij.dev/tutorials/basic-functionality/ [1] https://github.com/sponsors/imsnif

Maybe it's because I don't use it that intensely, but I've found the default a bit noisy, so I switched my default layout to only contain `pane` and turned pane frames off.

TurboVision from the 1980s or 1990s has draggable and overlappable windows inside a single shell/DOS screen.

https://tvision.sourceforge.net/tvQNX-pterm-photon.jpg

Yes but that's just writing to the vram directly, just as keyboard and mouse are read directly. Not the madness of going through heaps and loads of batshit crazy terminal extensions, escape codes and decades of cruft and hacks piled upon the tty.

That's not correct. Tvision has worked in terminals for almost as long as terminals have existed.

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

Reminds me a bit of twin: https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

I found out about it from this blog post nearly two decades ago: http://web.archive.org/web/20190120170204/http://www.termina...

Unfortunately zellij doesn't implement job control properly, so running certain daemons or other things that use process groups are very broken.

    set-option -g mouse on

Drop that in your ~/.tmux.conf file.

Then you can create new windows or panes by right-clicking (and clicking on the drop down), click on a pane to focus it, click on a window name to focus it, right-click to rename it, drag to highlight text or to adjust the width of a pane, etc, etc.

Try Byobu with mouse-mode on. It uses a tmux as a backend and provides complete control with a mouse, including context menus that allow you do all of the things you listed without obscure keyboard shortcuts.

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