I'm curious for folks who use multiplexers: I've tried tmux and Zellij and if I used a multiplexer, it would be Zellij. However, I can't stand losing terminal real estate, but I don't know why that is. How do you deal with the loss of real estate from a multiplexer?
I use Ghostty, so new tabs and splits don't feel that strange to me. I'm guessing the feature I'm missing out on is session resumption and presets? If I leaned into that more, then a multiplexer would be worth the potential drawbacks?
Zellij has a ton of chrome by default to make it discoverable for new users, but you can customize your layout so it only takes up one line at the bottom of your screen, like tmux. I like to also hit F11 to go fullscreen, which gets me a few more lines.
Switched to Zellij a few years back mostly for the sane defaults, I expected to come crawling back to tmux, but it's actually stuck quite nicely and has become a staple in my workflow. It hasn't been a perfect experience, but I like it a lot and I'm happy to see a new feature-rich release like this.
Being cheeky here, but how many terminal emulators and multiplexers do we need?
What is driving the Cambrian explosion of CLI tools in the last ~5 years?
I’ve been using Linux since 2001 and use standard Konsole on zsh. I have a graphical desktop environment to deal with windows and showing pictures alongside them. Is it perhaps because I am an Emacs person that all I need exist within its loving embrace?
TUI got back into fashion and it seems like everyone is trying hard to reinvent GUI in a really roundabout way, like hacking Braille to display graphs. I think the circle will be complete with the support for proportional fonts for readability, like in Emacs. Character sizing is already (kind of) a thing, which ridiculously enables Markdown rendering in a terminal.
Man, I really want a proper GUI framework with this kind of energy behind it.
Aesthetics, running TUI tools headless over SSH, zero possibility of Electron (although I’ve seen TUI tools written in node which is almost as bad), no worries about X/Wayland jankiness.
Frameworks like bubbletea make it very easy these days.
I think there’s a limit though, a good TUI shouldn’t be “modern”, it should be like the old TUIs that ran auto shops and accounting systems. TUIs that are information dense, keyboard-driven, and snappy are hard to beat.
I don't know, I have too many tools that would really benefit from using GUI (e.g. coding agents, process monitors) but are using TUI and are written in TS instead. Everything about TUI screams jank to me, even the old kind. Both internals and presentation. It's less readable, way more limited, just about everything in it is bad, maybe except the ability to mix it with the CLI programs, but it's quite niche and you could do it the other way in the GUI (embed a terminal, like many apps like Zed or Total Commander do). And of course there's absolutely nothing that stops anyone from developing information-dense, keyboard-driven, and snappy GUI apps that run headless.
> there's absolutely nothing that stops anyone from developing information-dense, keyboard-driven, and snappy GUI apps that run headless.
This is true, and yet...
For some reason GUI seems to attract bloat, excessive margins/padding, and sloppy practices. Maybe it’s just that web views are too tempting to resist.
It’s the (very small) price you pay for a great and free product (I think it’s great!!!).
If you don’t like that ‘feature’ you’re not forced to use it ;-)
I use Ghostty, so new tabs and splits don't feel that strange to me. I'm guessing the feature I'm missing out on is session resumption and presets? If I leaned into that more, then a multiplexer would be worth the potential drawbacks?
What is driving the Cambrian explosion of CLI tools in the last ~5 years?
I’ve been using Linux since 2001 and use standard Konsole on zsh. I have a graphical desktop environment to deal with windows and showing pictures alongside them. Is it perhaps because I am an Emacs person that all I need exist within its loving embrace?
Man, I really want a proper GUI framework with this kind of energy behind it.
Why go through all that effort and leaky abstractions to display GUIs when you can just bitblt pixels from memory to a framebuffer directly?
Frameworks like bubbletea make it very easy these days.
I think there’s a limit though, a good TUI shouldn’t be “modern”, it should be like the old TUIs that ran auto shops and accounting systems. TUIs that are information dense, keyboard-driven, and snappy are hard to beat.
This is true, and yet...
For some reason GUI seems to attract bloat, excessive margins/padding, and sloppy practices. Maybe it’s just that web views are too tempting to resist.