Make Tmux Pretty and Usable

Re:Make Tmux Pretty and Usable by fullstop on Monday April 13, 2026 @01:38PM (#47755406)

I have a few embedded devices where flash space is limited. tmux is so much smaller than zellij, and it's not even close.

Zellij is close to 50 megabytes, but tmux and all dependent libraries (minus libc, it's always there) is about 2 megabytes.

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Re:Make Tmux Pretty and Usable by rstuart4133 on Monday April 13, 2026 @10:07PM (#47760417)

> Zellij is close to 50 megabytes,

That's a Rust thing. It's what happens when you statically link because you monomorphise everything.

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Re:Make Tmux Pretty and Usable by pmarreck on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @02:04AM (#47761828)

One of the reasons I went Zig for now

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Re:Make Tmux Pretty and Usable by Pay08 on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @01:02PM (#47768250)

And the Rust practice of everything needing at least 300 libraries. It's slowly getting to JS levels of insanity.

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Re:Make Tmux Pretty and Usable by mokoshhydro on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @06:18AM (#47763642)

Screen is only 280Kb (armv7), statically compiled with curses. That's about 6-9 times smaller compared to tmux.

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Re:Make Tmux Pretty and Usable by fullstop on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @08:26PM (#47773205)

Yes, but I already require libevent and friends. The overhead, compared to "screen" was worth it, and I get split windows.

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Re:Make Tmux Pretty and Usable by sitzkrieg on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @06:42PM (#47772403)

and this is a great example why rust will never be relevant in embedded development that actually matters

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Re:Make Tmux Pretty and Usable by fullstop on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @08:25PM (#47773197)

So I looked into this at one point. Apparently there are ways to reduce binary size.

When I first started learning Rust, my "hello wold" binary was HUGE.

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