# Zellij 93 Hacker News commenters recommended Zellij and 33 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 2 years (5 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A friendlier tmux alternative with good mouse scrolling, intuitive default keys and sessions that persist across reboots, though it lacks copy/paste buffers and copying from scrollback. ## Why people recommend it - Friendlier UI that works out of the box (4 comments): "Zellij is a lot smoother and nicer looking out the box, and its key shortcuts are pretty intuitive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47215327)) "Zellij fits my brain a lot better. Plus, it has a lot of UI affordances to discover features" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167242)) "With its significantly better UI and overall user experience, I was instantly convinced." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47753105)) - Tabs, panes and mouse scrolling (4 comments): "Just even for how tab and panes are setup, and how it's good for scrolling and text selection with your mouse for copy pasting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47753032)) "how tab and panes are setup, and how it's good for scrolling and text selection with your mouse" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757714)) "I can mouse over a pane in zellij and use two-finger scrolling to scroll only that pane without any problem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104165)) - Sessions persist across reboots and SSH (4 comments): "I can SSH into my desktop from my laptop remotely to continue my dev session exactly where I left off." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47081766)) "The ability to instantly spin up my entire dev environment with everything just where I like it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378438)) "On reboot it remembers my tabs and panels and even commands that ran inside last" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47212256)) - Intuitive default keybindings and guidance (3 comments): "Zellij is a lot smoother and nicer looking out the box, and its key shortcuts are pretty intuitive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47215327)) "I like the scroll info, the default bindings, and the fact it plays nicely with my setup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762622)) "Zellij can do things like floating windows, contextual keybinding guidance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47466680)) ## What people warn about - No copy/paste buffers or scrollback copying (3 comments): "With the one caveat that it does not (yet) support copy/paste buffers or copying from the scroll back buffer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565619)) "selection and copying and pasting which made me abandon it as I was getting frustrated" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50299148)) "This is also the dealbreaker for me, I use copy / paste from the scrollback buffer all the time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762848)) - Config and tmux binding gaps (5 comments): "I wanted to believe, but wasn't able to get most of my config working the same in zellij since it has fewer configuration knobs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46701375)) "You can't rebind plugin maps, so the session picker uses my preferred unlock chord to create a session. Dev had no interest in changing that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761520)) "a number of corner cases I depend on in tmux simply don’t work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761814)) - Poor landing page and documentation (2 comments): "The landing page does a bad job at explaining what it is, same with the first page of the documentation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167894)) "horrible design fails on the first page supposed to introduce the software" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766733)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [tmux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tmux.md): 411 recommend - [Herdr](https://hackerapproved.com/p/herdr.md): 232 recommend - [GNU Screen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-screen.md): 33 recommend - [zmx](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zmx.md): 23 recommend - [Rex by Superlogical](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rex.md): 21 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Zellij", https://hackerapproved.com/p/zellij/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).