"One of the things that stood out to me right away was how dreadful UI looked. Not only it felt uninviting, but it almost felt “gatekeepy” - if you don’t know how to use it in this configuration, then might as well forget about it."

I'm puzzled how we get from unintuitive interface to "gatekeepy" (which I'm assuming implies a deliberate attempt to make the set of users small). Things can be difficult to use without anyone setting out to exclude new users, some things _are_ difficult to use, and other things are written by people who haven't been paid to make them address the needs of a wider range of users than they want to.

glaucon, I agree with you. Most of feeling of "gatekeepiness" came from being a novice at using tmux and having to get used to a new workflow. tmux is as gatekeepy as vim, or other complex cli tool is - if you have never used it in the past, you might find it to be a challenge. That was all I was trying to point out. It is an entry in a diary of a noob tmux user :D