zellij terminal workspace

I began using zellij a month or so ago, as my workflow at work got complicated, for which, I needed a single window with multiple terminal prompts on the work laptop running debian (over WSL). Set a layout, which I was previously setting-up manually at every terminal session — a pane split horizontally, like so, and saved it to ~/.config/zellij/layouts/ck_layout.kdl:

layout {
    pane split_direction="horizontal" {
        pane
        pane size=30
    }
}

and called this in within ~/.config/zellij/config.kdl like so:

default_layout "ck_layout"

Every terminal session now loads with this pre-set layout, and it saves me a few keystrokes. I like this simple split so much that I’ve ported it to my daily driver.

After a bit of use, I’ve decided the split to be 70:30 (often the top pane the smaller one). Also, rather than loading the layout by default, I’ve assigned an abbreviation in fish shell to be as so:

abbr ze zellij # load zellij sans custom layout
abbr zl zellij --layout ~/.config/zellij/layouts/ck_layout.kdl

These let me run the choice of layout on the terminal.