Because it's not immediately obvious, Zellij is a terminal multiplexer like tmux or GNU screen, whose distinguishing feature is that it comes with more built-in functionality, has a more discoverable UI, and a more opinionated/modern default configuration while still being highly customizable (as demonstrated in the OP).
HOT DAMN! Over the last few weeks I've wished almost daily I was proficient in tmux, but it's annoying to get started in because you have to look up EVERYTHING. I just tried Zellij (they have a "try without installing" command on their website) and it's exactly what I wanted Termux to be. Thank you so much for this comment!
Too bad it isn't a drop in replacement for tmux because of memory usage. There are memory leaks and even without that the base memory uses is a couple hundred megabytes. Tmux on the other hand, consumes only tens of megabytes of memory.
Hey, there are no memory leaks that I'm aware of (there were a few, but we plugged them in recent months). If you know differently, I'd appreciate an issue report.
If you run e.g. btop or bpytop in a separate zellij tab, zellij will eventually gobble up all your memory and die.
In the beginning I wa very entusiastic and switched from tmux to zellij on remote machines, but as I usually have btop running in a tab it would die in a day or two, so now I'm back to using tmux on remote machines and reserve zellij for local (and make sure I don't run btop in a tab).
I'm now running v0.37.2 on a remote machine with 3 tabs: a shell, syslog spooled by lnav, and btop. To me it looks like it grows by 2 kB RAM every minute. I am logging to a file with timestamps, and we will see the results tomorrow.
In the course of less than 12 hours zellij grew from 93 MB to 1227 MB in roughly 2 kB increments per minute. Closing the tab running btop will release the stolen memory.
I will append a comment to the Microsoft GitHub issue mentioned above a little later.
Thanks! If you could also specify how you measured it and attach some debug logs (there are instructions in the issue template) that would be great. Because my instance has run overnight without issue and I'd love to be able to reproduce this.
But I still use it all the time now — I found it so much easier to get up to speed with relative to tmux. And it's getting better all the time, so I'm happy to invest in it...
Its not tmux, are you sure you're engaging its binding which enables/disables its binding map, I belive Ctrl+G IIRC, unlike tmux which prefixes its bindings with a customizable chord
https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij