Zellij is a really nice, modern alternative to screen and tmux, and they've done a great job at having good defaults as well as making the UI easily discoverable. I'd highly recommend it to anyone else who felt dubious about the benefit-to-effort ratio of terminal multiplexers.
I gave it a shot a couple years ago -- pretty slick. But the latency was noticeable compared to tmux, which I remain using today. I admit that I'm kind of sensitive to it, as at the time I was already on a latent connection.
I personally haven't noticed that, but we all have different sensitivity levels to such things. Have you tried it more recently? A couple years ago is ancient in its lifespan. I'd be curious to see if it still feels sluggish to you.
It could also be in my case that I use it so little that some latency is tolerable. I don't develop interactively in zellij or tmux. I mainly keep some logs tailing, and DB consoles open, etc, and I don't check them super often.
Last time I looked at Zellij it looked like a great new project in the multiplexer ecosystem, but didn't support a purely keyboard-driven copy/paste mechanism. I use that extensively and couldn't do without. So tmux it is until that gets added.
Yeah, I also use that all the time. I use the terminal because I want to use my keyboard, not the mouse. And copy / pasting is something I do very very often. So I don't understand why people make a terminal multiplexer and don't add this feature.
In screen & tmux you can also use vim shortcuts to navigate the scrollback buffer. That is so convenient and makes me work so fast. I can search for a snippet close to where I want to copy some text, and then navigate more precisely with the vim shortcuts.
So that's the first thing I look for in a terminal multiplexer, because if you're gonna expect that I'm gonna put my right hand off the keyboard and use the MOUSE to awkwardly select some text in a TERMINAL, then you expected wrong.
I had the same when I was trying out tmux first time. But eventually I configured tmux to very closely match screen's shortcuts. Just a few things are different, but I got back some extra features and plugins from tmux with it.
https://zellij.dev https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij