[cracoucax]

I've switched from tmux to zellij about 2 monthes, ago, it may have less features than tmux for now but it certainly does all i need, in most case better than tmux. It is much more user friendly and usable imo.

Frankly i've spent too much time in the past fiddling with complex confs and tools which expect the user to spent days figuring out a conf which work for them. Then if you don't use the tool for 1 month, or simply don't edit the conf for a big while you've forgotten half of it.

Zellij has a conf file, it took me a bit of time to tweak it at first, but i know I can understand it in a pinch. Same thing for actually using it, it's mostly discoverable.

And most importantly, it is very clear that simplicity and predictability are big priorities. It shows everywhere in the project, I totally vouch this approach and tend to do the same thing on my work projects. I know from experience than understanding your user's needs and getting out of your way to make their life easy by not having to think about how the implementation is done is really much harder that just making a tool configurable and extensible...

So, big kudos to you Zellij devs !

[VyseofArcadia]

> It is much more user friendly and usable imo.

I've never quite understood why TUIs on *nix systems seem so downright unfriendly compared to TUIs on ye olde MS-DOS systems. Some of them are excusable, sure. vi predates consumer TUIs, and vim clones it. Emacs at least has a menu bar, even if there's no on-screen indication that F10 activates it.

But tmux was created in 2007. I can think of no reason for it to have such an obtuse UI other than "they're just like that on *nix". Would at be so much to ask to at least by default have a "press C-b ? for help" on screen?

[jbverschoor]

Because of a fixed buffer/direct access to the buffer. Compared to line-based / control code streams

[scientist4397]

Not really true just look midnight commander, it runs under Linux but have the look and feel of an old DOS app :)

[20after4]

It has the look but not the feel. Norton Commander was extremely fast on a 4.77mhz 8088 (basically an 8 bit processor pretending to be 16 bit. It took two clock cycles to move 16 bits across the bus). It's no comparison between those old DOS apps written in ASM that really optimized every instruction for a specific architecture. They felt 100x faster and more immediate than modern computers.

[nequo]

tmux is not entirely dissimilar to GNU Screen which uses `C-a` rather than `C-b` as its prefix key. That conceptual lineage may explain some of the UI choices.