goodbye Zellij

After a brief foray into using Zellij, I dropped it a while back and have continued to use tmux.

Turns out my favorable view of Zellij is mostly based on decent default key bindings. I thought I’d miss the stack – which I did like and didn’t find a decent way to do in tmux – but it’s been months and I haven’t missed it yet.

I drifted away from Zellij due to lack of status bar and control over appearance. Theoretically there are add-ons for it, but it wasn’t straightforward and the setup for tmux requires no add-ons for this very basic functionality.

I now borrow heavily from the key bindings in Zellij for my tmux configuration.

I dropped the use of the prefix in favor of alt/meta for things I do frequently.

For example, toggling the zoom is not alt+f, cycling windows is now alt+[* or alt+*]. I experimented with alt+x and alt+v for enter selection mode and pasting the buffer, respectively, but it didn’t stick. I’m not even sure those were the bindings I picked, I can’t recall.

Relevant config bits:

set -g mode-keys vi
set -sg escape-time 0

set -g prefix C-b

# prefix then hjkl to move in that direction
# but don't wrap past it
bind -n M-h  if -F '#{pane_at_left}'   "" 'select-pane -L'
bind -n M-j  if -F '#{pane_at_bottom}' "" 'select-pane -D'
bind -n M-k  if -F '#{pane_at_top}'    "" 'select-pane -U'
bind -n M-l  if -F '#{pane_at_right}'  "" 'select-pane -R'
bind -n M-] next-window
bind -n M-[ previous-window

# convert new window keys to use same working directory
bind -n M-"'" split-window -v -c "#{pane_current_path}"
bind -n M-5 split-window -h -c "#{pane_current_path}"

bind-key -n 'M-f' resize-pane -Z

I do need to have escape-time set to 0 for tmux so that my vi-keys in Bash work as expected and so that tmux doesn’t think I’m trying to switch panes when I’m really telling Bash to do stuff.

brief foray into using Zellij

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goodbye Zellij

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