hamedmp/native-zellij-bakeoff

Native Zellij Terminal Bakeoff is a comparison project rather than a single application. It contains three separate, independently built attempts at the same goal: a fast, native macOS terminal app that treats Zellij, a terminal multiplexer that manages sessions, tabs, and panes, as proper desktop UI elements you can navigate with a mouse and drag and drop, instead of only through keyboard commands in a text interface. Each of the three attempts was built by a different AI agent given the exact same brief, and each agent worked without looking at what the others produced. Matrix Terminal renders through Ghostty, a terminal emulator, and layers native tabs and pane overlays on top of a Zellij session using a WebAssembly bridge. Mosaic keeps Zellij running in the background as the authority for sessions and processes, while building native views for each individual pane. ZellijDesk takes a more conservative approach, wrapping Zellij's own command line interface with a native SwiftUI and AppKit control layer that adds drag and drop and the ability to discover SSH connections. The repository owner reviewed all three finished applications and picked Matrix Terminal as the winner based on their own product judgment, though the README is careful to note this is not a controlled benchmark since the agents may have had different tools, runtimes, or time available. Each of the three app folders keeps its own build instructions and documentation, and the project intentionally excluded build artifacts, caches, and machine-specific files when copying the source snapshots into this repository. The project is written primarily in Swift, since all three attempts are native macOS apps. As of this README, no single license has been chosen for the three generated applications as a whole, so anyone wanting to reuse or build on them should check with the project owner first. Screenshots and conversation transcripts from building the apps are noted as coming later but are not yet included.