Zellij 0.35.1 Stacked Panes and Swap Layouts

We just released Zellij 0.35.1, including an exciting array of new features and bug fixes. Let’s dive in to some of them!

Stacked Panes

Stacked panes are a new and unique way to arrange panes in your workspace. You can now arrange panes in a stack, showing only the title line of all but one of them - with the last one expanded just like any other pane.

You can page through them up/down as you would normally move through panes (eg. with Alt + <arrow-keys>, or Alt + hjkl), move them around with Ctrl + h + <arrows>/hjkl and even select through them with a mouse click.

To get stacked panes

1. Start Zellij
2. Open 3 panes with Alt + n
3. Press Alt + [ to change the layout to STACKED (see “Auto and Swap Layouts” below for more details).
4. If you like, you can open more panes in the stack with Alt + n or move through them with Alt + <arrow-keys>/hjkl

Stacked panes can also be included in your layouts

Auto and Swap Layouts

Another major feature of this release is “Auto Layouts”. Previously, when opening new panes without specifying a split direction (eg. with Alt + n), Zellij would do its best to place them in the largest free area on screen. While great as a stop-gap solution, we decided we could do this more intelligently.

Starting this version, Zellij will lay these panes automatically according to a predefined set of layouts. These swap_layouts come built-in, and can also be configured and adjusted to your liking

As their name implies, you can also switch between these layouts whenever you want (by default with Alt + []), if you’d like to rearrange the panes currently on screen.

These swap_layouts are distinct for tiled panes (the “regular” panes on screen) and floating panes.

To try these for tiled panes:

1. Start Zellij
2. Open one or more panes with Alt + n
3. Press Alt + [] to cycle through the swap layouts until you find one you like

To try these for floating panes:

1. Start Zellij
2. Open a new floating pane with Ctrl p + w
3. Add more floating panes with Alt + n or Ctrl p + n
4. Press Alt + [] to cycle through the floating swap layouts until you find one you like

Don’t like this feature? It can be disabled by adding auto_layout false to your config

Floating Panes in Layouts

This version also adds the ability to add floating panes to layouts. So now we can do:

layout {
    pane edit="src/main.rs"
    floating_panes {
        pane command="cargo" {
            args "check"
            y "55%"
            width "45%"
            height "45%"
        }
        pane command="cargo" {
            args "run"
            x "1%"
            y "1%"
            width "45%"
            height "45%"
        }
        pane command="cargo" {
            args "test"
            x "50%"
            y "1%"
            width "45%"
            height "45%"
        }
    }
}

And get:

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