I spent some more time playing around with Zellij this morning. I’ve gone from “cautiously interested” to “wow, this is pretty nice.” The nano-style help text in the bottom of the window, the simple navigation between panes/tabs, and the mouse-clickable tabs are all great if you are torn between different kinds of muscle memory.

I made a three-pane layout that keeps Emacs handy in a tall pane, plus two smaller stacked panes for my agenda and today’s todo list. I run the two lists with watch in their respective panes so they’re updating as things change, and I gave the Zellij session a specific name so I can easily rejoin from my laptop.

Having my task list and daily agenda in such a simple, bare-bones, always-there format works a lot better for me than going to web pages or opening apps. I know that stuff is in a named tab in my single terminal window. Because it’s all plain text, it’s much easier to take a glance and learn what I need because there’s not much extra going on.

As much as I like having the on-screen help I can see turning off the help menu at some point once I’ve got a little better muscle memory. Training wheels. Zellij has a lot of visual cues, and they can all be disabled once you’re ready.

I haven’t done a ton to configure it at this point. I did find the theme directory in the repo, which includes a few old stand-bys. For configuration stuff pane_frames false turns off the frame treatment around each pane, which makes for less visual clutter.

Stardew Valley and Vampire Survivors

I think I prefer this to the usurious raccoons of Animal Crossing. I’ve just about gotten tired of my inevitably bad, painted-into-corners-of-my-own-devising first character, so over the weekend it’ll be time to start a serious run.

Still playing Vampire Survivors but it dampened my own enthusiasm a little when I realized you can get the Garlic powerup and baically spend the first ten ranks of any level just standing there watching the bad guys self-immolate in your garlicky aura. I got one character to last for 29 minutes and 95 levels never straying more than a screen’s width or two away from the starting point.