For me it felt (!) like screen is pretty much obsolute since 10+ years. When tmux came I switched and never looked back and I know a few that handled it the same.
If the keys and functionality don't work exactly as GNU Screen does then this won't help me. The behavior and keystrokes are so far burned into my brain that it doesn't make sense at this point to learn a new tool unless/until every system I use under the sun doesn't support GNU Screen anymore.
That’s great for your own machine or even common home directory scenarios. The issue is when you have a bunch of machines to manage without chef/puppet/etc or hop onto a random machine or a machine you don’t own etc… defaults are what you get to work with.
If screen is there and I need to do something that lasts longer than my ssh session, screen is what I reach for. If it’s non-interactive, I reach for nohup next.
They re-keyed it specifically so it could be nested, however, they mention the prefix key is intentionally dumb and ment to be remapped, probably to ^a like screen.
^a is the worst for emacs users since ^a is begging-of-line which we use a ton.
When I first started using screen some years ago the emacswiki (I think) even mentioned it and recommended to remap it to ^p which it is for me for screen and tmux since then.
I hadn't used Zellij before, but I tried it out. Visually it works better than tmux and it shares enough key bindings with tmux to make it a pretty seamless transition.
With that being said, the binary is huge. I get that zellij is statically linked, but tmux is about 900KiB and has minimal dependencies. I'm flabbergasted that a terminal multiplexer, stripped, is 38MiB.
True, but zellij also does more. I'd also give it more of a stink eye if it were something I were running many times inside the inner loop of a script, but as something you generally launch once and leave running forever, eh.
I occasionally have to recalibrate my units. I just launched Emacs on my Mac and it's using 350MB of RAM. That's astonishing when I think about Amiga programs I wrote, but it's also just 0.53% of the RAM in this particularly machine. It's probably larger than it could be if someone ruthlessly trimmed it back, but I'd rather spend that time using the other 99.4% of my machine to do more fun stuff.
I have a few embedded devices which have just 128MiB of flash, and they can run tmux just fine. I wouldn't even consider zellij for this purpose, of course, and having tmux down there is more of a "this is a nice thing for development purposes" thing.
Regarding memory usage, Zellij appears to take up 63 MiB versus tmux's 3.8MiB. It's nice and all, but quite a pig. This is on Linux, maybe Mac is different.
Embedded is a lot different, to be sure. I'm surprised there's room for tmux on something that tiny.
But on desktop systems, on my Mac, Zellij takes 28MB of disk and 40MB of RAM. That's 1/37,000th of my available disk and 1/1,600th of my RAM. I'm all for optimized, tiny apps, but those are below my attention threshold.
> I'm surprised there's room for tmux on something that tiny.
A question that comes to mind is, under what circumstances would you expect a TUI based program that processes streaming text not to fit on a system that is otherwise capable of user interaction? It seems vaguely in the vicinity of the simplest possible interactive task you could come up with.
Certainly it generally isn't worth hyper-optimizing mainstream desktop applications to wring out the last few MB, let alone KB, of RAM in this day and age. However that doesn't answer the question - why would more than 1 MB of program binary be required for multiplexing text in a terminal? At least at first glance it honestly seems a bit outlandish.
Note that "embedded" like this includes e.g. many modern routers.
Also note that computers with much less disk space than 128 Mb could and did run full-fledged GUI apps in the past. For example, the entirety of Windows 95 is ~100 Mb when installed.
The product uses libevent and libc already, so adding tmux only consumes a few hundred KiB in the image. The root filesystem is squashfs, so it's even less in practice.
Definitely more of a fish vs zsh situation, in my opinion.
tmux, to me, feels like "modern screen". It has some cool features, but at the end of the day, it just wants to be a terminal multiplexer. Great!
Zellij on the other hand seems to offer terminal multiplexing as an obvious first-class use case but "not the whole point". At the surface, Zellij is an opinionated terminal multiplexer that uses a nice TUI to give discoverability which you can turn off when you're ready to gain screen real estate. It's easy to make Zellij behave exactly like tmux/screen, and it's easy to configure via a single config file.
Where Zellij takes a turn in to a different direction, however, is that the workspaces you can configure with it can do all sorts of interesting things. For instance I once built[0] a python cli app which had a command that would launch a zellij workspace with various tabs plugged in to other entrypoints of that same python cli, basically allowing me to develop a multi-pane TUI as a single python Typer app. In one pane I had the main ui, and then in another stacked pane I had some diagnostic info as well as a chat session with an llm that can do tool-calling back out to the python cli again to update the session's state.
I think wrapping up a project's dev environment as a combination of mise (mise.jdx.dev) and zellij or nix+zellij to quickly onboard devs to, say, a containerized development environment, seems like a really neat idea.
> Where Zellij takes a turn in to a different direction, however, is that the workspaces you can configure with it can do all sorts of interesting things.
That’s been a pretty standard feature of tmux since forever.
In fact the reason I first discovered tmux was because some Irssi (terminal IRC client) plugins used tmux to create additional panes for Irssi.
tmux is one of those tools that does a lot more than most people realise but the learning curve is steep and features aren’t easy to discover.
Zellij looks interesting but these days I mostly use tmux as a control plane rather than a terminal UI. So the enhancements of Zellij are wasted on me.
A quick example is that mouse scrolling works by default. I see it more like ripgrep vs grep. Either can do almost anything the other can, but one has much more modern, ergonomic defaults.
I used to used zsh, like I still have have karma moving up on stackoverflow as I answered my own questions on some obscure configuration fine tuning. But currently I'm more in a "give me the thing that work off the shelf" moment, so I take fish and don't plan to either look back.
Byobu with tmux as backend is my go to solution if I want a multiplexer, for what it worths.
When I realized how powerful TRAMP was, I don't think I ever used screen/tmux again. I'm sure there are uses, mind. Just TRAMP fully hit all of my needs.
It really is magical, isn’t it? And although I rarely need to use it, I love the multihop setups where you can ssh to this system, then ssh again to this other, then mount an SMB filesystem using these credentials, and start editing.
