OK, title is a bit of clickbait. It saved me some inconvinence 😉

Yesterday, Wezterm crashed.

At first, I was worried that all my “work” is lost (few blog posts were in-progress and open in helix)

But I had forgotten that I always start zellij these days.

So all my “work” was indeed there.

All I had to do was zellij ls followed by zellij a my_session1 (and my_session2 and so on)

(undocumented?) Zellij Keybindings

Undocumented, because these don’t show up in the default configuration, which shows (I assume) most useful key bindings. I had to look for these, and found them in Github discussions/issues.

• Ctrl p d
  • Ctrl p is for pane, but d after that (which I assume stands for down) is not documented.
  • This creates a new terminal in horizontal split fashion ¹
• Ctrl n - to reduce the size of the terminal.
  • By default, it is split 50-50
  • Usually, you’ll want more screen real estate for the editor (Helix in my case, but works for (n)vi(m) or emacs-in-terminal as wlel)

There is also a possibility of running a floating pane. This may be used for running a server process, which mostly one doesn’t need to look at constantly.

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.

At work, I need to load test new framework I had deployed.

Usually, I work with QA team. They use JMeter (with Azure Load test) for such task.

But today, the QA person was busy with other tasks, and I didn’t want to get blocked.

Since I am learning rust, (nu-shell is built in rust) I remembered that it may be possible to run parallel requests in nu-shell.

and it is!

Earlier I wrote about various utilities written in rust. Nu shell is one of the most important of them (It is an entire shell after all, not just single utility)

Installing

Turns out I had installed nu-shell earlier, but via macports

and I had forgotten about macports (and nu shell)

Mysterious upgrade failure (Or so I thought)

When I installed nu-shell via brew I got the latest version, but nu kept invoking older version.

The tips from my previous post didn’t quite work while writing the blog post using helix editor.

But as much as I can guess, it is a feature of the terminal and not the editor itself. So no point searching “Accent marks in Helix” 😄

Turns out initially¹ wezterm didn’t support accent mark without special configuration. ('use_ime = true'), but since then it is enabled by default.

Yet, it didn’t work for me.

I used zsh for couple of years, and then switched to fish mainly for its built-in autocompletion.

fish is a modern shell (just like helix) and thus (I think) it does several things differently. For someone using various shells for over 2 decades, resisting muscle memory does not come easy. ¹

I was used to export KEY=value, so in fish I always had to look up How to set an environment variable in fish 😆 - even after 2 years.

Towards the beginning of the year, I had written about Fuzzy Search in fish For the better part of the year. I only used Ctrl-R functionality, that too occasionally.

Then today, I came across the same again, and after going through the README, I noticed at least one more useful keybinding.

git status normally would just list the modified files etc. To see what has changed, one needs to git diff <filename>

I had installed Wezterm long time ago. I think when I started looking for alternatives to Alacritty. But I settled on kitty (I think I could not get wezterm to work)

• Few days ago, I stumbled upon it again, and I wanted to give it a try.

So these days, I’m using wezterm as terminal. I specifically liked the built-in multiplexing feature. I haven’t tried it yet 🤷‍

Some time ago, I started using kitty terminal emulator. I used Alacritty for a long time. But Alacritty is meant to be minimalistic in a sense it does not even have concept of having different tabs.

The suggestion/solution is to use tmux (or like) to manage different shell instances.

And I did that.

And learnt a great deal about tmux in the process.

I don’t regret it one bit.

But sometimes, tmux gets in a way of how terminal based programs look (and behave) when executed inside tmux.