Zellij

Zellij is a terminal workspace (multiplexer) for developers, ops engineers, and anyone who spends most of their day in a terminal. It aims to be usable out of the box for beginners while still giving power users deep customization through layouts, plugins, and keybindings.

Unlike older multiplexers, Zellij ships with sensible defaults and a visible status bar showing available keybindings, so new users aren't left guessing. It also supports a plugin system based on WebAssembly, meaning plugins can be written in any language that compiles to WASM, not just the multiplexer's own scripting language.

Key features

• Layouts: Define pane and tab arrangements declaratively and load them automatically, useful for repeatable project setups or personal automation.
• Plugin system: Write plugins in any language that compiles to WebAssembly, letting you extend Zellij's UI and behavior beyond built-in functionality.
• Floating and stacked panes: Manage panes with UX patterns beyond the standard tiled-split model common in older multiplexers.
• True multiplayer collaboration: Multiple users can attach to and interact with the same session, useful for pair programming or shared debugging.
• Built-in web client: Access a Zellij session through a browser, making a local terminal emulator optional for connecting to a session.
• Beginner-friendly defaults: On-screen keybinding hints and a status bar reduce the learning curve compared to configuration-heavy multiplexers.
• Cross-platform packaging: Available through OS package managers, prebuilt binaries, or cargo install.

Ideal use cases

Zellij fits developers and ops-oriented users who want persistent terminal sessions that survive SSH disconnects, with panes and tabs organized around a specific project or workflow. It works well if you want to define a layout once (say, an editor pane, a log-tail pane, and a shell) and reload it every time you start work on that project.

It's also a good fit for teams that want to share a live terminal session for pairing, teaching, or incident response, since sessions support true multiuser attachment. The web client makes it usable in environments where installing a terminal emulator isn't practical, such as accessing a remote box from a locked-down machine or a tablet.

It is less of a fit if you need a minimal, dependency-free multiplexer for constrained embedded systems, since Zellij is a full Rust binary with a plugin runtime rather than a lightweight C tool. If your workflow depends heavily on an existing tmux or screen configuration and plugin ecosystem, migrating means rebuilding those workflows around Zellij's layout and plugin model, which is a real cost to weigh.

Installation

The recommended way to install Zellij is through a package for your OS (see the project's third-party install docs for package manager options). If no package is available, download a prebuilt binary from the latest GitHub release and place it in your $PATH.

To install by compiling from source with Cargo:

cargo install --locked zellij

To try Zellij without installing it, run the launch script for your shell:

# bash/zsh
bash <(curl -L https://zellij.dev/launch)

# fish/xonsh
bash -c 'bash <(curl -L https://zellij.dev/launch)'

For development, clone the repository and use the project's xtask runner:

# run a debug build
cargo xtask run

# run the full test suite
cargo xtask test

Installing from the main branch is discouraged for regular use since it contains pre-release code that can break or corrupt the version cache; use tagged releases instead unless you're contributing to development. Configuration options are documented on the Zellij website's configuration page.