Built-ins and the status bar

Here’s a thing that surprises people: Zellij builds its own UI out of plugins. The status bar, the tab bar, the session manager, the file picker, all plugins. They’re WebAssembly modules that render UI, react to state, and drive Zellij, and they’re first-class citizens sitting right alongside your terminal panes.

You’re already using several. The status-bar shows the mode and its keys. The tab-bar is the tab strip up top. compact-bar is the slim combined bar. strider is the file navigator (and filepicker is strider rooted at /). session-manager is the switcher from Module 6.

Plugins load from a layout with a plugin node. The location can be a built-in alias (zellij:status-bar), a file path, a URL, or a bare alias you’ve defined. This is exactly how the default layout puts the status bar at the bottom of your screen.

pane size=2 borderless=true {
    plugin location="zellij:status-bar"
}