I use Ghostty, so new tabs and splits don't feel that strange to me. I'm guessing the feature I'm missing out on is session resumption and presets? If I leaned into that more, then a multiplexer would be worth the potential drawbacks?
It also supports "layouts" which are similar to `tmuxinator` scripts. You can set up a bunch of tabs and split panes and run commands in each to start up your text editor, agent, git client, etc. The ability to instantly spin up my entire dev environment with everything just where I like it, configurable on a per-project basis, is what keeps me in the console instead of using desktop apps.
What is driving the Cambrian explosion of CLI tools in the last ~5 years?
I’ve been using Linux since 2001 and use standard Konsole on zsh. I have a graphical desktop environment to deal with windows and showing pictures alongside them. Is it perhaps because I am an Emacs person that all I need exist within its loving embrace?
Man, I really want a proper GUI framework with this kind of energy behind it.
Why go through all that effort and leaky abstractions to display GUIs when you can just bitblt pixels from memory to a framebuffer directly?
Frameworks like bubbletea make it very easy these days.
I think there’s a limit though, a good TUI shouldn’t be “modern”, it should be like the old TUIs that ran auto shops and accounting systems. TUIs that are information dense, keyboard-driven, and snappy are hard to beat.
This is true, and yet...
For some reason GUI seems to attract bloat, excessive margins/padding, and sloppy practices. Maybe it’s just that web views are too tempting to resist.
I for one have used Zellij every day for years and would struggle to get by without it!