Transition from iTerm to Alacritty + Zellij

Maintaining my home server has made it increasingly challenging to transition between my daily driver, macOS, and my server running Ubuntu. Since I spend most of my time in the terminal, the main challenge has been adapting to the differences in how the terminals work. These differences aren’t just between iTerm2 (my terminal emulator on macOS) and GNOME Terminal (my terminal emulator on Ubuntu) but also in the muscle memory that comes with using them.

This disparity started to hamper my daily workflow, so I decided to ditch iTerm2 in favor of a terminal that would allow me to have a consistent setup across all my computers.

Alacritty

Alacritty is a fast terminal emulator written in Rust. It focusses more on simplicity and speed instead of focusing on fancy features. At first moving away from iTerm2 to Alacritty definitely gives the impression that we’re taking a step backwards. Will we manage without triggers, inline images, annotations, etc.? To my surprise, I haven’t missed many of these features.

Zellij

One thing I did miss was split panes and tabs. Over the years, I apparently have grown to use them extensively however Alacritty does not provide such features. So that set me looking out into other solutions. That’s when I discovered Zellij, a terminal multiplexer.

Zellij is similar to tmux in many ways, where it allows multiplexing of terminals as well as roviding you with a session manager. It…