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.

I got a boom for my USB shotgun mic (a Rode VideoMic GO). It mounts on the back of my desk and swings in and out of place between calls. It sits about eight inches away from my face, but just off camera (yay relatively tight 23mm crop) and the sound quality is sooo much better than when I had it mounted in my X-T2’s hot shoe. Much more presence and bass, much less reverb. Okay. Time to start a podcast. I can feel it.

tmux alternative

Zellij is a terminal multiplexer ala screen or tmux, but it’s got a nicer onboarding ramp than either thanks to a decent menu that exposes most of what you need and out-of-the-box UX touches.

Through the holidays

We had a pretty good holiday season this year. Ben was home from his first term at UofO, and we had a quiet couple of weeks with few obligations. Work was pretty quiet, too: We had a major system change slated for the interim week, then the vendor backed out, so there was a little bit of “shrug, I guess there’s this paperwork to catch up on,” which is a fine way to spend that week.

It’s good to be almost on the other side: We have a balance day off this Friday, so this will be a three-day week, then back to normal next week.