Intro

I usually use kitty as my terminal. It's pretty customizable and has built-in tabs/splits and layouts, which are very easy to use with the default key bindings. After watching 2023 Top 5 CLI Tools You Need to Know! I decided to give zellij a try.

Installation

I went down cargo - lane so that I can use cargo-update to update all my tools installed via cargo:

cargo install zellij

To autostart zellij on shell creation, I added

# zellij
if [[ -x "$(command -v zellij)" ]]; # works, because I have ~/.cargo/bin in my path
then
  eval "$(zellij setup --generate-auto-start zsh)"
fi

To setup the config file, I used

mkdir ~/.config/zellij
zellij setup --dump-config > ~/.config/zellij/config.kdl

To get rid of the outside frame, I set pane_frames false.

Alacritty

Because the pane / split - feature was the only reason to use kitty for me, I switched from kitty to alacritty as my new terminal.

I think I will do an alacritty - related post in the near future.

Cheers!