Feature Request: A new pane UI inspired by Zellij

[P Z]

Hi,

I've been a long-time user of tmux and love its stability and scriptability. However, I've recently been looking at Zellij and find its pane UI particularly appealing for visual organization.

I would like to propose adding support for a "Zellij-styled" pane rendering option in tmux.
Specifically, I am interested in:

* Pane Frames: A distinct border/frame around each pane that contains the pane title and status, rather than just a simple line divider.
* Adjustable Margins/Padding: The ability to configure spacing/padding inside/outside the pane borders. This would allow users to create a cleaner visual separation between the border and the content, greatly enhancing layout flexibility.
* Rounded Corners: (Optional) Support for rounded borders if the terminal font/renderer allows.
* Sticky/Floating Headers: Keeping pane titles visible and distinct within the frame.

I believe these changes would greatly improve readability when managing many splits, making it easier to see which pane is active and what process is running in it at a glance.

I have attached a reference screenshot of Zellij to illustrate exactly what I mean by this styling.
Is this something that could be implemented via a user option or a plugin interface in the future?

Thank you for your hard work on tmux!

[Carl Andersson]

Hi!

I would suggest that you use Zellij or send patches.

16 Jan 2026 07:52:17 P Z <pei...@gmail.com>:

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[Nicholas Marriott]

This WIP PR might be what you want

https://github.com/tmux/tmux/pull/4747

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[Thomas Sattler]

Hi,

while I usually prefer the simple one line borders, I'm also
sometimes in need of some pane details. Therefore I bound

set -w pane-border-status

to a key. To show the pane number, as in your screenshot,
you can set pane-border-format to

" Pane #D "


I use a much more verbose setting like this:

" #D #{pane_current_path} #[dim]#T#[none]
#{pane_width}x#{pane_height} #{pane_tty} "

Together with a bit of bash magic, the #T shows the process
currently running. For quite a while I used

trap 'printf "\e]0;%s\a" "$BASH_COMMAND" > /dev/tty' DEBUG

But it has some limitations: When running 'a; b; c', it only
shows one command after each other "a" -> "b" -> "c", and
when running 'a | b | c' only shows 'c'. So now I use

bind -x '"\C-o":printf "\e]0;%s\a" "$READLINE_LINE"'
bind 'RETURN: "\C-o\n"'

Which is known to "fail" at all sorts of history expansion
like '!!' (which re-runs the last command, but shows "!!"
in the title).

Thomas



Am 16.01.26 um 07:49 schrieb P Z:

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