Module 1 · Lesson 18 min

Why a multiplexer

A terminal multiplexer runs many terminals inside one. Instead of a window per shell, you get one persistent workspace you split into panes, group into tabs, and keep alive as a session that outlives the window you’re looking at it through.

The persistence is the real prize. A Zellij session lives in a background process. Close the terminal, lose your SSH connection, restart your terminal emulator, and the session keeps running. You reattach and everything is exactly where you left it. That’s the difference between a workspace and a pile of terminal windows.

Zellij’s pitch over tmux and screen is discoverability. It shows you a status bar with the current mode and the keys available right now, so you can learn the tool by using it rather than by memorising a cheat sheet first. This course leans into that: read a binding, then press it in the terminal next to you within seconds.

Start a session by name

zellij --session whetstone

Practice

Try it yourself

Start your first session

Get a named Zellij session running so the rest of the course has somewhere to live.

Run zellij --session whetstone in a terminal
Notice the status bar that appears at the bottom of the screen
Run a command inside it, like ls, to confirm it's a normal shell

Done whenYou have a shell running inside Zellij, with a status bar along the bottom of the terminal.

Recall

What survives a disconnect

Fix the model before moving on.

You close your terminal window without doing anything special. What happens to the Zellij session running inside it?

Reveal answer

Nothing bad. The session keeps running in the background; you reattach later with zellij attach whetstone and find it exactly as you left it.