Turn Your Terminal Into A Tiling Window Manager With Zellij

today I want to share a really neat piece of free and open source software with you this program it's called zage what is zelig it's a terminal multiplexer it's very similar to something like G new screen or to t-u so zage what it allows you to do it allows you to take a terminal emulator a terminal window and divide it into panes it basically turns a terminal almost into like its own tiling Window Manager now the name zage is very interesting what does that actually mean at first I wasn't sure how to pronounce it because I thought maybe it was like one of the intellig uh products but it's not piece of free and open source software has nothing to do with intellig so it's not zelig it's actually zelig what this is this is a Moroccan Arabic word and it means Mosaic which is actually a pretty cool name when you think about it for a terminal multiplexer zage is available on both Linux and Mac for download and installation and if you want to test it out without installing it which is kind of neat they do have these commands that you can enter in the bash shell the Z shell or the fish shell and just enter the appropriate command for your shell and you can actually test drive zelig without installing it you can find the source code for zelig over on GitHub again it's free and open source software licensed under the MIT license so let me switch to an empty workspace let me open a terminal let me go ahead and run zeage without any other arguments the great thing about zeage it's very new userfriendly it only takes you about 10 minutes to learn a lot of the basic key bindings to navigate around in zage by default when you first open it you have one pane here that opens your shell and then at the top you have a tab bar and at the bottom you have a status bar and this status bar has pretty much all the key bindings you need to know right here so the very first thing you want to do is probably open a new Pane and if you want to open a new pane there's a couple of different ways you can do this you could do control peve for pain and then it has a new submenu here and you see in for new and that opens a new pane but you can see I could also have done just alt in to open new pan so alt in also opens a new pan looking here through the basic key bindings you can see contrl plus h would move a pan so let's do controll H and then I get this submenu and you see I can navigate with the arrows and I can move I can move that up or I can move it over to the left hand section make it the main pain and then I could hit Escape if you want to close a pain you can do contrl p for pain and then you have X for close here so X would close that paint if I do contrl p again to get back into this menu you also have f for toggle full screen so I can make that pan full screen and it gives you a hint that you're currently in full screen and that you have one hidden pane if I do contrl p for pain again I could toggle f for full screen and it toggles that back off you also had a floating mode in there I don't know if you saw that but contrl p and w to toggle the floating window you know now we get this new pane that is a floater right I can do an LS or I could run htop in that and then contrl PX to close that window now anytime you want to quit out of zage all you need to do is control q and it will kill this zage session and all the pain so control Q just quits gets you back into the proper shell here now one of the most fascinating parts of zeage is uh the documentation because the documentation even though you know you have all the key bindings and everything already in zage itself you don't really need to learn too much there is a really interesting aspect to zage and that is configuration because you can actually make a configuration file and that's what I've done I went ahead and created a a little config file they give you an example of a config file I go into chapter five here layouts creating a layout and they give you some examples of some things you can throw in a config file that way when you launch zage you give it the location to this config file and it just preloads all your panes and whatever order you want launching them in whatever programs you happen to want as well so if I go to some of the examples of these layouts files um here is the example they give it's just this basic layout where it opens three panes right it splits it into three panes they're all just launching the shell there's nothing terribly complicated with that what I did is I copied that and then if I go back into the shell and I give it the location to where I copied that file and I place this file in config slz SL example- layout. KDL is the extension for these files if I run that that is an example file there right actually I I modified it in a a slight way because I did specify in one of the panes for it to actually run htop let me switch to an empty workspace and I'll show you that file so let me go ahead and open with uh Vim fig /z/ examples. layout I'll zoom in here and you can see the layout's pretty simple first we have layout and then opening and closing brackets Pane and then a second pane so you get you know the two columns but in the second pane you can see I split it vertically and within it I have two panes one is just a the default pane which is the shell and then I have Pane and then command equals htop which gives me htop in this Pane and that is a very basic example layout because there's really nothing complicated I'm not really launching any programs I'm not giving any programs any arguments I also didn't include a lot of the uh visual bars I didn't include the tab bar at the top I didn't include the status bar at the bottom here but you can include all of that if I actually do controll q and let me up arrow and I do ze-- layout and then I give it the location to this example layout file all I created in this one I've got a little bit more stuff going on first I decided to put the tab bar at the top here because if I wanted to use tabs it it would be nice to have the tab bar to let me know which tab I was in I I probably wouldn't use tabs a whole lot in this because it's kind of Overkill you're already multiplexing you know splitting things into panes and then you have a tab with a whole new set of paines going on but if you're one of those people that really live in the terminal you might find tabs useful so I put the bar at the top and then I also went ahead and added a status bar back here at the bottom and there's a couple of different uh status bars there's actually a compact bar that doesn't show quite as much information but I wanted the key bindings here because again I'm rather new to this and you can see in the panes I specified launching neovim in one running the ls command with various Flags in the other Pane and then htop here in this Pane and let me show you this example file so this layout file again has a little bit more stuff in it again just as an example for you guys to follow along what I did is the very first pane is actually the tab bar so if I go back that section gives me the tab bar here at the top and then the very bottom pane you can see is the status bar so that's the status bar at the bottom and then everything in between the tab bar and the status bar are the pains inside and you can see the first pain is running the command invm neovim then I'm doing a horizontal split and then within that I've got two panes and the first pane is running the command LS and then arguments d l ah because you can't just give a command and then some arguments inside the command you actually have to split up the command and the arguments for that shell command and when you do this you can see it's command and then space and then the command it's not command equals command if you don't give it any arguments then the command is actually pain command equals command but if I was giving it an AR arent there's no equal sign and then you got to give it arguments as a a separate argument if you will but this layout file is pretty easy to work with and again this this is what this looks like you know in action by the way since I mentioned the tab bar if you did want to use tabs contrl T would actually create a tab so control T get you this tab submenu and if you wanted a new one in for new and now we have tab two it just created a whole new tab and by default it does the same default layout out so we have tab two if I click on it with the mouse I go back to tab one it's kind of hard to tell because they're running the same thing but I can solve this problem by exiting out of one of these commands this LS command has finished so let me uh go ahead and hit Escape Escape drops you back into the shelf and now this is tab two this is tab one now you can see that we're on two different workspaces if you will now of course you probably don't want to use the mouse uh because if you're in a terminal you're going to have your hand on the keyboard to switch between the tabs in the terminal contrl T to get that submenu again and then change Focus you can see you can use the arrow keys also hjk L works so if I use um H to go left I'd go back to tab one if I go right with L I go back to tab two until I hit escape to get out of that control tab menu if you want to adjust the size of your windows very much like you would expand or Shrink windows in a tiling Window Manager you can do that with crln crln is size and then H and L for left and right so L right H left and again escape to get out of that so that's just a really brief overview of zel Edge I've been playing around with it for a couple of hours today and I just thought it was one of the best programs as far as a terminal multiplexer I've ever used because I don't really have a need for a terminal multiplexer I don't because I have a tiling Window Manager that's my terminal multiplexer when I'm using terminals Plus if I'm going to do that kind of terminal workflow where I need a lot of paines I'm just going to open up emac and emac itself is a multiplexer right so I don't need a a multiplexer inside a multiplexer if I'm using emac but I do think this kind of program would be extremely useful for you guys that do live in the terminal if you're a terminal slvm user and then this kind of program makes sense if you're a terminal slvm user that uses a floating window manager or a desktop environment like gnome or KD plasma you're going to love zeage now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode Matt James Steve armor Dragon dof datus gdr George Lee Matthew methos Aran Paul Peace Arch and Fedor reality foress red profit Rolland solry T Ro ginu and abun and Willie these guys they're my highest steered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick look at zeage would not have been possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like zelich subscribe to Dro tube over on patreon peace guys