tmux vs Zellij
How has interest in each changed?
Collected from public datasets outside Stackness, not from stacks on this site. A series both tools have shares one chart and one scale, because its unit is the same for both. Data sources
Mentions, monthly
tmux: Hacker News mentions: 2 mentions (2009) to 91 mentions (2026)
Zellij: Hacker News mentions: 1 mention (2021) to 14 mentions (2026)
Imported from Hacker News mentions
Installs, monthly
tmux: Homebrew analytics installs: 44,830 installs (2026) to 37,500 installs (2026)
Zellij: Homebrew analytics installs: 3,098 installs (2026) to 2,728 installs (2026)
Imported from Homebrew analytics
Questions asked, monthly
tmux: Stack Exchange data explorer questions asked: 1 question (2009) to 0 questions (2026)
Zellij: Stack Exchange data explorer questions asked: 2 questions (2025) to 0 questions (2026)
Imported from Stack Exchange data explorer
Series only one of them has
Pageviews, monthly
tmux: Wikipedia pageviews: 6,010 views (2015) to 3,870 views (2026). Imported from Wikipedia pageviews.
Who uses both?
No member lists both tmux and Zellij yet.
No member has recorded moving from one to the other yet.
What do people pair them with?
Tools that members list in the same stack as each of them.
Which moves use tmux?
- One tmux session per project with fixed window layout by Mika Johansson
How do they differ?
tmux is the terminal multiplexer that is already installed on most servers, which is a large part of why people keep it. It is scriptable, stable and familiar to anyone who learned its prefix key years ago. Zellij is newer, written in Rust, and shows its keybindings on screen, with layouts, floating panes and WebAssembly plugins. People who SSH into many machines, or have years of tmux configuration, tend to stay with tmux. People starting out, or who never got comfortable with tmux's keybindings, tend to find Zellij easier to pick up.
Written by Sergei Gordeichuk,