From TMUX to Zelllij - a great choice

Why the switch

I am really a person who likes to switch things up every time and try something new. To be really honest, Tmux worked great, but it was starting to bother me that copying with the mouse resulted in a lot of blank characters. And the real reason why to switch is because it’s written in Rust :)

How did I experience the switch

The switch was quite easy. At the start, I was really confused because every time I wanted to press ‘backspace’ it resulted in doing some random stuff. This was quite weird and made me re-map the ‘move’ functionality to ‘ctrl + m’.

I was really try-harding with pressing ‘ctrl + g’ (locking pane) to be able to press backspace - but this was not the intended way of using Zellij.

After doing the remaps, I started to get really used to Zellij, and it grew on me quite quickly. It just makes sense! In Tmux, you have one leader key, but in Zellij, you have a different leader for each mode. For example, Ctrl + s goes to search and trailing it with another s results in searching. Moving pages up and down is as easy as Ctrl + s, u for up, d for down. I’d be a bigger fan of making it all Vim keybindings, but that wouldn’t help Emacs users. For the vimmers between us, moving between panes is already mapped to arrows but also the godly hjkl.

My configuration

cat ~/.config/zellij/config.kdl 
theme "rose-pine"
pane_frames false
scroll_buffer_size 30000
copy_command "xsel --clipboard --input"
keybinds {
        unbind "Ctrl h"
        normal {
                bind "Ctrl m" { SwitchToMode "move"; }
        }
}

The following is added for the following reasons:

• theme rosepine : because it’s just beautiful.

• pane_frames false: it’s a lot of clutter with pane frames.

• scroll_buffer_size 30000: scrolling back in lin/winpeas is otherwise a pain.

• copy_command “xsel —clipboard —input”: xclip didn’t copy my commandline to my host via VM, but xsel did work.

• the keybind: fixed backspace bugging.

Maybe some other changes will be made over time, but I try to keep it minimal for easy copying through machines.

Benefits of Zellij

Its fast, its safe, it is beautiful.