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Comment by EPendragon | Hacker News Reader

I will definitely check it out. Thanks for the suggestion! What would you say is different between tmux and Zellij, and why did you start using the latter?

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If you've used Neovim vs Helix, I'd say the comparison is pretty close.

Tmux is more customisable, but a lot messier out the box. It's much older so has picked up a little cruft along the way.

Zellij is newer so has the benefit of being a clearer implementation. But it's designed as an "out the bix" experience, not one you can customise to your hearts content.

Edit: if you did want to try out zellij, I should point out there's a "no install, try in shell" option on their website's main page which is a super quick way to get a taste!

> Tmux is more customisable, but a lot messier out the box.

I have definitely felt that. Customization wasn't necessarily straightforward - just required some time spent reading the docs.

I appreciate the heads up about the "no install, try in shell" option. I will make sure to take a look!

You can't rebind plugin key maps and creating a new session conflicts with my preferred custom mode bindings. It's clear the devs are both rather opinionated and want to ship features, but they gotta clear stuff like that up, I'm not interested in doing that from CLI when tmux does this without issue.

0.41 included some "non-colliding keybind" option, and you can clear-defaults in the config now, so this issue might be fixed. I haven't tested it but I recall seeing news about it.

Last I tried it the bind issue and performance were sort of blockers for me, but it looks like both of those are moving forward.

https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/releases/tag/v0.41.0

I'd actually inquired with the dev on rather that change also applied to plugin bindings but he'd replied that it did not

Another ex-tmux user here: for it was text selection with mouse without extra line breaks, introduced by line wrapping when long strings are rendered.

I gotta admit that the initial experience in copy mode in tmux made me cringe a lot. The fact that scrolling up scrolled through the history of the terminal's commands was the most unexpected thing. After I enabled mouse use, it became usable for me.

I’ve been loving zellij.

I don’t know what it is about how my brain works, but I have absolutely no memory for keybinds (and envy those that do), so I love that it just lays them out in the UI.

Only customisation I make is to turn off the borders.

Would love if built a similar, visually guided, experience for nvim.

At least LazyVim[1] that I use does have visual help for key shortcuts - I can either press the first key (often prefix aka space) and get a popup of continuation keys, or use <space>sk to search keys.

[1] https://lazyvim.org

If you only wanted to use that feature, you could install the whick-key plugin that LazyVim uses: https://github.com/folke/which-key.nvim

> Would love if built a similar, visually guided, experience for nvim.

Definitely would recommend checking out Helix. My brain is similar in that keybindings often don't stick - Helix has a grammar leading to a bit more of a visual interface (you select things first, and then edit, so you can see how things go as you carry out multi-cursor edits etc), but also, it'll show pop-up menus for shortcuts.

In normal mode for instance, "g" is "goto", pressing g also displays a little window that shows the different options and their keys. It's easy to ignore when you know what your doing, and super helpful when you can't remember something!

Should say that it's really similar to the tmux/zellij distinction, in that, helix works nicely out the box, but is a lot more opinionated, there's LSP support for pretty much all languages you'll use, but no plugin eco-system, so if you have a really customised, or AI based workflow for instance, your kinda stuck.

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