I'm curious for folks who use multiplexers: I've tried tmux and Zellij and if I used a multiplexer, it would be Zellij. However, I can't stand losing terminal real estate, but I don't know why that is. How do you deal with the loss of real estate from a multiplexer?

I use Ghostty, so new tabs and splits don't feel that strange to me. I'm guessing the feature I'm missing out on is session resumption and presets? If I leaned into that more, then a multiplexer would be worth the potential drawbacks?

what do you mean by losing terminal real estate?

If you mean the navbar/where it shows the tabs/windows/whatever, doesn't ghostty also have a tab bar?

With screen/tmux (and I assume zellij), you can hide the tab bar completely if you want.

Zellij has a ton of chrome by default to make it discoverable for new users, but you can configure it so it only takes up one line at the bottom of your screen, like tmux. I like to also hit F11 to go fullscreen, which gets me a few more lines.

It also supports "layouts" which are similar to `tmuxinator` scripts. You can set up a bunch of tabs and split panes and run commands in each to start up your text editor, agent, git client, etc. The ability to instantly spin up my entire dev environment with everything just where I like it, configurable on a per-project basis, is what keeps me in the console instead of using desktop apps.

There are separate session persistence daemons you can use instead of a full-fledged multiplexer - dtach, abduco, shpool, zmx, etc.