Why I switched to Zellij

I had tried switching to tmux for local shell sessions in past, but never truly understood why I might need it.

I extensively used tmux for remote sessions. But why might I need it locally ?

Then slowly I stopped using tmux and switched to wezterm which provided multiple tabs.

Fast forward several years later.

Recently I came across Zellij. I decided to give it a go.

When I had tried tmux it took some time to get used to the keybinding.

No so with Zellij¹. The keybindings are always shown just below the window. So learning them wasn’t difficult, plus one can always look it up. It is right there 😊

But that was not enough.

What blew my mind, and made me switch was that

It remembers sessions even after I’ve exited from the session.🤯

At first it was confusing, but later I noticed how powerful that is.

It also remembered that I was running hx in that session when I exited.

When reattached (we can reattach even to dead session, unlike tmux) it showed Waiting to run 'hx' and options like Press Enter to run 'hx' and Esc to drop to shell

How cool is that. 😎

Configuring Zellij

Zellij switched to KDL recently (Earlier it used YAML like everyone else)

Creating initial file is easy.

mkdir ~/.config/zellij
zellij setup --dump-config > ~/.config/zellij/config.kdl

Since KDL is also a text format, updating it isn’t a problem.

The auto generated file comes with loads of comments and commented config

One can just uncomment appropriate sections and that is it.

TBH, I didn’t need to setup my config till I needed to set theme for Zellij

Define theme colors in the config.kdl file like shown here then specify the theme in the config file as theme "nord"

For now, I’m quite happy with Zellij.

Usually, I’ll have a few sessions defined one per project.

Any of the sessions can be easily detached, or exited (as well as restarted if/when required. So no need to keep them running, unless you really need to switch between projects.)