Over the past few years, I've been daily driving my favourite editor, Kakoune.

Although, I am too lazy to fully study its capabilities, it's really a modal editor that actually makes sense for me in terms of how it changed text editing from Vim.

I tried to pair it up with other multiplexers and so far, I think tmux is the one for me.

Prior going back to tmux§

I tried different terminal multiplexers so far from kitty to tmux to kitty to wezterm and then zellij.

Kitty was the terminal emulator that I really loved from 2019-2020. I even remembered trying to create my own small plugin just to move around with neovim.

The problem, however is that although neovim has a rich plugin system, it's also a fast moving target, as the editor has a lot of contributors and experimenting its core from performance to extensibility. That is good and all but I don't want to maintain every breaking change of the plugin system.

Hence, I abandoned it on June 20, 2024.

I switched kakoune around that time and I noticed that despite its very minimal features, it is easy to create a plugin for it by utilizing the existing tools in your environment.

Around that time, I think I have switched to zellij because Rust. I agree, it's a bad childish reason but I also saw zellij's potential. However, I noticed that I am held back by it by a lot that I think I should go back to tmux.

As for the terminal emulator, kitty, I think I abandoned it too not because it's a bad terminal but having a multiplexer over a multiplexer seems to be a bad idea and I am afraid of having conflicting keys and overlapping functionality. I even tried wezterm + tmux or ghostty + tmux but I just don't feel like there should be overlaps.

And I don't need ligatures. I was a fan back then of ligatures but because ligatures are inconsistent across terminal emulators, I decided to just use alacritty (or foot on Linux).

Why Tmux?§

Honestly, it's easy to write scripts on tmux. It can be done with zellij of course. But the biggest reason why I prefer tmux over zellij is the default keybinds.

Yes, there is also zellij tmux mode but tmux keybinds do not conflict with kakoune and that's a thing that I notice when I use kakoune over tmux e.g. reverse-search conflicts with new pane.

Another thing is customizability. Tmux is very old so a lot of plugins and built-ins were added over the years as well as guides that help newcomers.

I actually attempted to check a thing where I have to create a script to open fzf and pass the selected text for buffer and file selection and it seems it's very hard to do with zellij. I have to create a helper shell script for it e.g. https://github.com/uncomfyhalomacro/kakudite/blob/main/scripts/fzf-to-kak-client whereas with tmux, it's just https://github.com/uncomfyhalomacro/kakudite/blob/aa9909d5fe8ebca4766b34ff0844186e9402cc80/kakudite/custom-tmux.kak#L83

Although, zellij already has a functionality to move a pane to a tab, it does not have

• an action to move a pane to a tab; or
• transform a pane as a tab

It's possible to script it but I think I won't go down that route. With tmux, it's just

tmux break-pane

Overall, I just can't with zellij for now. It's possible that I can write plugins for it but I just don't have the time. It's still a good project, and even my friends use it so if things improve in the future, I might try but I don't think that's very soon™️.