Zellij Is the Best Terminal Multiplexer

Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

Mouse Mode¶

By default Zellij captures mouse events (click to switch panes/tabs, drag borders to resize, wheel to scroll scrollback). The command

zellij options --disable-mouse-mode

turns mouse handling off for the session, handing the mouse back to your terminal emulator and the program running inside the pane. The main reason to do this is text selection / copy-paste: with mouse mode on you usually have to hold Shift to select text, while disabling it restores native terminal selection. The tradeoff is you lose click-to-focus panes, drag-resize, and wheel scrolling of Zellij’s scrollback.

To make it permanent, set it in ~/.config/zellij/config.kdl instead:

mouse_mode false

Session Management¶

zellij -l welcome

Zellij Web¶

1. You can create a token using zellij web --create-token and then start a web server for zellij using zellij web .

2. By default, zellij web uses the IPv4 address 127.0.0.1. Modern browsers (Chrome, Edge, ect) might resolves localhost as the IPv6 address ::1. If that’s the case, visiting localhost:8082 will results in the error code ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE . It is suggested that you use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost when visiting the web page or doing local port fowarding via SSH tunneling.

3. Use mkcert to create certificate for hosting HTTPS if you need to share sessions beyong the local network.

For more discussions, please refer to The Zellij Web Client - Share Sessions in the Browser .

Resize Panes¶

For more discussions, please refer to Stacked Resize and Pinned Floating Panes .

Filepicker¶

filepick is cool but doesn’t seem to be as useful as your ffd & fcd, etc

zellij run -f -- plugin filepicker

zellij run -- plugin filepicker

zpipe filepicker | xargs -I {} cp {} ./destination-folder/

zpipe filepicker | xargs -I {} $EDITOR {}

In Zellij, the filepicker is an alias for the built-in filesystem navigator plugin, Strider. Reworked significantly starting with version 0.40.0, it allows you to quickly browse files, fuzzy-find, and jump right into editing.

Depending on how you want to use it, here is how to launch and pipe data through it:

1. Launching the Filepicker Directly¶

You can open the filepicker inside a new floating or tiled pane directly from your terminal:

• As a floating pane:

zellij run -f -- plugin filepicker

• As a tiled pane:

zellij run -- plugin filepicker

2. Using the Filepicker with CLI Pipes (zpipe)¶

Zellij supports terminal pipes, which means you can pass the path chosen in the filepicker directly to another CLI utility or text editor.

For example, to pick a file and immediately copy it:

zpipe filepicker | xargs -I {} cp {} ./destination-folder/

Or to open the selected file in your default $EDITOR:

zpipe filepicker | xargs -I {} $EDITOR {}

3. Custom Keybindings¶

If you want to pull up the filepicker with a quick keyboard shortcut, you can add a binding to your Zellij configuration file (config.kdl).

Add this under the shared_except "locked" block to launch it in a floating pane with Alt + f:

keybinds {
    shared_except "locked" {
        bind "Alt f" {
            LaunchOrFocusPlugin "filepicker" {
                floating true
                move_to_focused_pane true
            }
        }
    }
}

4. Overriding the Default Filepicker¶

Because filepicker is an alias in Zellij, you aren’t locked into using Strider. If you prefer a full-featured terminal file manager like yazi or ranger, you can redefine the alias in your config.kdl:

plugins {
    filepicker url="file:/path/to/your/custom/picker_plugin.wasm"
}

References¶

• Zellij @ GitHub

• Zellij Tutorials - screencasts