Zellij

Canonical version: Zellij.

Zellij is a modern terminal multiplexer written in Rust. It positions itself as a "terminal workspace" that doesn't sacrifice simplicity for power; discoverable UI with on-screen keybinding hints makes it approachable without limiting what power users can do.

Key Features

• Floating and stacked panes: first-class floating panes (toggle with Alt f), persistent across hide/show. Stacked panes layer multiple panes vertically for compact layouts
• Layouts: KDL-based layout files define panes, tabs, commands, and plugins. Version-controllable and shareable
• Session management: session manager (Ctrl o + w), welcome screen, and session resurrection (restore closed sessions with full pane structure, even across reboots)
• Command panes: treat shell commands as first-class panes with visible exit codes and one-key re-run (Enter)
• Plugin system: WebAssembly-based plugins; write in any language that compiles to WASM (Rust has first-class SDK support). The entire UI (tab bar, status bar, session manager) is built from plugins
• Web client: built-in web server serves sessions in the browser with authentication; useful for remote access and multiplayer collaboration
• Scrollback editing: open any pane's scrollback in $EDITOR (Ctrl s + e)
• Multiple pane select: bulk operations on panes via Alt + click

How It Compares to tmux

Installation

# Cargo
cargo install --locked zellij

# Try without installing
bash <(curl -L https://zellij.dev/launch)

References

• https://zellij.dev
• https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij

Related

• Terminal Multiplexers
• TMux
• Rust
• Shell
• Command Line Interface (CLI)
• Terminal User Interface (TUI)
• Ghostty
• Alacritty
• Secure Shell (SSH)
• WezTerm — GPU-accelerated terminal with built-in multiplexing, Lua config
• Byobu — the wrapper approach to the same discoverability goal
• shpool — the unbundled alternative

About Sébastien

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