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Comment by llagerlof

18 hours ago

I used tmux for a few years, until one day I discovered Zellij. With its significantly better UI and overall user experience, I was instantly convinced.

12 comments

llagerlof

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nDRDY  18 hours ago

This comment would be a lot more convincing if it weren't in response to one expressing the same sentiment :-)

  • azthecx  18 hours ago

    It is actually true though, I only use tmux nowadays when I am SSHed into a server that I need to do some work on.

    The only issues I've had with it is that sometimes it's hot keys conflict with vim, but you can easily turn it temporarily off with ctrl+ g.

    If you're already used to tmux I'm not sure you would benefit much from changing, but it definitely has a better out of the box with pane hints, names, and more user friendly hot keys.

    • pmarreck  3 hours ago

      > user friendly hot keys

      I see everyone complaining about this but as a new tmux user as of a few months ago, I had an LLM assist me with configuring it how I wished and it did a bang-up job. Stuff like using “-“ to split horizontal and “|” to split vertical so you don’t even have to remember it…

    • brewmarche  16 hours ago

      Maybe give terminal windows in vim a try? vim is not a terminal multiplexer, but if all you need is multiple terminals windows:

      :term to open a terminal in a new vim window (or :vert term)

      Standard window movements apply (by default the window prefix is Ctrl-W), most important are: Ctrl-W,{hjkl} to switch between windows, Ctrl-W,{<>+-} to resize windows, Ctrl-W,{HJKL} to move windows to edges, Ctrl-W,{qc} to (force) close windows

      Enter normal mode of a terminal buffer with Ctrl-W,N: now you can perform vim motions and scroll the output

      Enter insert mode with i and you can type into the terminal again

      In insert mode: Ctrl-W "x to paste register x, Ctrl-W . to send a literal Ctrl-W. If too annoying, you can change the window prefix of vim

      This goes for vim, neovim also has a terminal mode but it works differently I think

fernandotakai  17 hours ago

i tried both and i honestly... i didn't see anything different.

i want tmux for three things:

1. easy splits

2. easy scrollback

3. being able to restart a session if my terminal dies

given all that, tmux works exactly as expected.

what are all these "significantly better ui and overall ux"?

  • Groxx  15 hours ago

    There's a number of people who effectively use tmux as their window manager - one terminal window doing literally everything. Locally as well as remotely, but it's more... understandable for remote, where other options are often worse or nonexistent.

    For them, there's as much variety of desires as for any other window manager, and there are tons of those. But terminal ones are usually significantly easier to configure in wild ways due to having fewer (but more powerful) knobs to tweak, so a fair number choose just one and configure the heck out of it.

  • dcminter  14 hours ago

    My terminal (terminator) does (2) and the "easy" scrollback on tmux messes up the ability to scroll with the mouse, at least with default settings. I just tried it in zellij and that doesn't. Since I'm only using a multiplexor for (3) and zellij does that too, I'm already inclined to switch.

    I know I'd get used to them, but the key combos used by tmux seem very odd choices, even to someone who used to code on a real glass tty!