Controlling Zellij through the CLI

Zellij can be controlled through the CLI. Meaning that while inside a zellij session, one can issue commands from the terminal to interact with the currently running session.

eg.

$ zellij action new-pane

Commands can also be issued to a different Zellij session:

$ zellij --session pretentious-cat action new-pane

For a full list of actions, see CLI Actions.

For starting commands in a new pane, see Zellij Run.

For editing a file in a new pane with your own editor, see Zellij Edit.

For loading and controlling plugins, see Zellij Plugin and Zellij Pipe.

Completions

For convenience, zellij provides cli completions for popular shells.

You can dump these completions to STDOUT and then append them to your shell's configuration file with:

$ zellij setup --generate-completion fish
$ zellij setup --generate-completion bash
$ zellij setup --generate-completion zsh

These completions also include aliases for running a command in a new pane and editing a file in a new pane:

$ zr tail -f /path/to/my/file # open a new pane tailing this file
$ zrf htop # open a new floating pane with htop
$ ze ./main.rs # open a new pane with your editor (eg. vim) pointed at ./main.rs

See your shell's documentation for information on where to append these.