Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included
34 comments
·December 5, 2025Milpotel
2025 and actual devs are still recommending to type "bash <(curl -L ...)" into a terminal...
Rucadi
If the source is known, it is not less bad that downloading a program and running it
homebrewer
It is if the script is written badly, gets truncated while it's being downloaded, and fails to account for this possibility.
Look into tailscale's installation script, they wrapped everything into a function which is called in the last line — you either download and execute every line, or it does nothing.
manmal
Serious question, why or how would a script get truncated when transferred over https?
Analemma_
This "what if it gets truncated in the middle of the download, and the half-run script does something really bad" objection gets brought up every time "curl | bash" is mentioned, and it always feels like "what if a cosmic ray flips a bit in your memory which makes the kernel erase your hard drive". Like, yes, it could happen in the same way getting killed by a falling asteroid could happen, but I'm not losing sleep over it.
quantummagic
It's just assumed you'll run it in an isolated container, or some other sandbox...
sesm
My dream workspace is a real browser (with all dev tools), with integrated terminal emulator and integrated editor. Editor plugins could be prototyped with web technology and debugged on the fly (like Obsidian plugins). Is there anything like this?
pomdtr
I built a project to add a terminal emulator to the browser (using a chrome extension): https://github.com/pomdtr/tweety.
I'm working on a `tweety edit` command which open arbitrary files in your $EDITOR of choice in a new tab.
maccard
You’ve basically described vscode!
not-so-darkstar
I don't understand the idea to make everything terminal-centric. It should be one component of all the tools available to the programmer.
All text editors worth using have a way to open a terminal for that one time you need it, everything else should be a GUI (with all the advantages that come with it).
dr_kretyn
Extremes are on both ends. Some people want to use a terminal for all, some don't want a terminal at all.
I'm a terminal guy because most UI I use is just unintuitive and requires a lot of mouse clicking - using mouse is just inconvenient to me. And often there are no tools for what I want to do, or rather, I'd need to open many tools to do something simple like change a file on a remote machine.
But I like a nice IDE, I use DB explorers, I use cloud code to write GUI for data processing and reporting visuals. Terminal is just a "killer app" that's useful for almost everything. So, if you're using regardless, why not make the experience better?
not-so-darkstar
I don't think terminal multiplexers (even Zellij which claims not to be one) make the experience better. They make it worse, actually, because when you have a problem there's one more thing to keep track of: Your terminal emulator, your terminal multiplexer and your TUI.
A decent terminal emulator like kitty solves all of this.
dr_kretyn
Horses for courses. A decent terminal emulator solves most of it. But I'm guessing there's a reason why there's so many terminal emulators and multiplexers.
Until a few months ago I used to use tmux + foot (tiny terminal), and I enjoyed the setup because I could copy over my tmux config to remote hosts and work as if nothing changed. As I'm mainly working local now, I'm now mostly using Kitty.
ghusto
For me it's because it's because most things are faster, easier, and don't change (what you learn retains it's value, and doesn't become worthless when the new hotness arrives). So for me it's the other way around; everything should be in the terminal, with a GUI for that one time you need it (`open .` on Mac to open Finder).
chrysoprace
GUIs are often mouse-centric, resource-hungry.
TUIs and CLIs are often keyboard centric only use as many resources as it takes to do the task, and then minimal resources to draw the text. Most CLIs also follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, so you can get an output from a CLI and then pipe it into another.
At work I literally use the same workflow at home across two different operating systems because they both share a terminal. I don't even know how to switch workspace on a Mac because I don't need to, tmux sessions fulfil the same task.
Barrin92
>Most CLIs also follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well,
basi cli tools yes, but software like the one we're commenting on has a TUI so complex they simply emulate graphical user environments and widgets but on a text rendering stack, akin to web apps pretending to be graphical applications on top of a markup language, except they do it out of necessity because that's how the web works.
If you want to draw graphical user interfaces on an operating system just use the... actual graphics stack. There's terminal apps with widget frameworks now that painstakingly try to reproduce what every OS ships with just because it's.. cool to be a terminal hacker or something?
acedTrex
Because its convenient in a terminal flow to simply hot key through everything without ever touching a mouse. Most GUI programs are inherently mouse driven so if you never touch your mouse they are not very convenient.
tomtomtom777
It's quite often useful to have multiple tabs or panes in your terminal. Zellij does this. It's a terminal multiplexer, like tmux. Mostly just a bit more beginner-friendly and polished.
So obviously it's terminal-centric.
klooney
The author's father agrees with you, which is pretty funny.
hollerith
I don't even use a terminal to run shell commands.
not-so-darkstar
Another fellow GVim user?
hollerith
Emacs, and as soon as my Emacs spawns the shell process, it sends it EOF, which is my way of saying, "I'm interested in seeing your stdout and stderr, but have no interest in conducting a dialog with you".
mistercheph
Keyboards are higher bandwidth man-machine interfaces than mouse + GUI unless what you're exchanging is spatial information, which is typically not the case for writing software.
There is a higher learning curve, and we can argue about the tradeoffs you make, but some powerful tools can be difficult to learn to use. Complexity != bad design; sometimes you're just exposing an underlying problem space that can't be simplified without being cut off from part of the solution space.
homebrewer
I use IDEA for most things and barely touch the mouse. It has its problems (like terrible performance), but it's a good example of a GUI done right.
Everything can be controlled through the keyboard, typing into every window does fuzzy search of its contents (and that window might contain a list of code symbols, a list of database tables, a list of search results, or many other things).
Every action can be bound to a key combo of your choice. Every interaction with the GUI can be stored as a macro, edited and replayed.
And so on, and so forth.
grepex
This 100%. For me, the philosophy is not so much a terminal-centric design but a keyboard-centric design. Sure, this could be done in a GUI, but even GUIs with a keyboard-centric design are not as fluid as a TUI.
I'll also add that (like the parent comment) I did not get the appeal. Not until I forced myself to use it more and saw the benefits.
not-so-darkstar
I didn't understand much of you said but it sounded mathy so I'm going to reply with a counterexample, just look up on youtube Russ Cox solving AoC with Acme and tell me that's not impressive!
By the way, using a GUI doesn't automatically using the mouse for everything, think of GVim or Emacs. the problem with terminal emulators is the emulating part, where they are forced to comply with the idiotic rules from the '70s.
dr_kretyn
I'm a terminal person and would love to try new things. But I just spent a few minutes on their page and have no idea why I would try to use it.
Can anyone help me learn why this over, say, kitty?
chrysoprace
It's not an alternative to kitty; it's an alternative to tmux or GNU screen.
I believe it's positioned to be more user-friendly than tmux but I've already got things memorised with tmux and it wasn't bringing anything new to the table, so I didn't try zellij for more than a few days.
tdubey
Is there improved guidance on migrating from tmux to zellij?
I've attempted to move over a few times, and while this is certainly user skill, it just felt too different from screen/tmux. Perhaps I should bite the bullet and force myself to get used to a new paradigm...
whimsicalism
i've switched over and really enjoy it. i feel like it's largely self documenting, what are your biggest hurdles?
jauntywundrkind
Fwiw lots of submissions over the years. I thought there was one a couple weeks ago but not seeing it. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zellij
Does it support sending and executing commands to the panes like tmux does?
like this:
tmux send-keys -t 0:1.1 "ls" Enter
edit: well, yes, you can:
zellij action write-chars ls
zellij action write 10