I rebuild herdr from master every few days to gauge the direction it’s moving in.
What herdr gets right over zellij:
- Default keybinds don’t conflict with helix. Even the leader key mode in zellij keeps alt-bindings around. Herdr keeps things nicely tucked away.
- There’s beta support for the kitty image protocol. Three years on, we’re still waiting in zellij.
- Notifications get passed correctly through to the terminal.
As for herdr’s killer feature, agent status monitoring, there is apparently a zellij plugin.
Big win for zellij: the docs and code feel human. By contrast, herdr’s docs have all the tells of a vibe coded project. Not to say the maintainer hasn’t put care into it! But I’m getting burned out on LLM docs.
To even get started with tmux you need to invest days to learn the keyboard commands. And yes good luck merging windows.
I can’t wait to forget all of the useless cli crap that Unix forced me to learn because nobody gave a damn about ux.