Rethinking My Terminal Workflow

I started playing around with Zellij recently. It’s a tmux-like tool that runs inside the terminal and helps manage multiple panes and tabs in one place. I’m new to both tmux and Zellij, so this is very much me exploring, not speaking from experience.

The reason I looked at this at all is that I keep ending up with too many terminal windows and tabs—usually one per project. Tabs work, but once there are a few, I lose track of what’s running, what’s waiting, and what I’m done with.

From what I gather, the main difference is philosophy. tmux is extremely powerful but expects you to set things up yourself. Zellij feels more opinionated, with sensible defaults and ready-to-use keybindings, which makes it easier to get started without a lot of configuration.

Zellij gives more structure inside a single terminal: panes, tabs, and named tabs that stay visible even in full screen. That alone fixes a small but real annoyance I have with macOS terminal tabs losing context.

I’m not convinced yet that it’s a clear upgrade over native tabs. New shortcuts mean new muscle memory, and there are some rough edges—copying text feels unclear, and links don’t seem clickable.

For now, this is just an experiment. The question I’m trying to answer is simple: does this reduce mental overhead when I’m juggling multiple projects? If yes, great. If not, that’s still useful to know.