Integrate Ghostty with Fish shell and Zellij (keybindings, auto launching)

[romanzipp]

I've tinkered around with Ghostty and was really impressed of how well it followed standards on macOS. So while switching from WezTerm to Ghostty, I've also brought my favorite tools Fish Shell (alternative to bash/zsh) and Zellij (alternative to tmux).

I will resolve this discussion myself in the following comment so people looking for the same stack of Ghostty + Fish + Zellij will have a nice starting point - hope this is fine!

Requirements

• Being able to use CMD + [n, t, w] and CMD + OPTION + [left, right] to navigate tabs in Zellij
• Being able to use CMD + C to copy highlighted shell contents
• Auto launching Zellij when opening a Ghostty Terminal window

[romanzipp]

I wrote about my motivations and some other config tweaks in a blog post, the solution below is a TLDR for this discussion.

ghostty Config file

See Ghostty Configuration docs, I've placed my config in ~/.config/ghostty/ghostty.

keybind = cmd+t=unbind
keybind = cmd+n=unbind
keybind = cmd+c=unbind
keybind = cmd+w=unbind
keybind = cmd+opt+left=unbind
keybind = cmd+opt+right=unbind

Fish config.fish Config file

See the Fish tutorial docs for more info, typically the config should be placed in ~/.config/fish/config.fish.

# Unset the default fish greeting text which messes up Zellij
set fish_greeting

# Check if we're in an interactive shell
if status is-interactive

    # At this point, specify the Zellij config dir, so we can launch it manually if we want to
    export ZELLIJ_CONFIG_DIR=$HOME/.config/zellij

    # Check if our Terminal emulator is Ghostty
    if [ "$TERM" = "xterm-ghostty" ]
        # Launch zellij
        eval (zellij setup --generate-auto-start fish | string collect)
    end
end

Zellij config.kdl Config file

Above, we've specified the ZELLIJ_CONFIG_DIR, so place your config.kdl in that folder.

keybinds {
    normal {
        bind "Super c" { Copy; }
        bind "Super Alt Left" { GoToPreviousTab; }
        bind "Super Alt Right" { GoToNextTab; }
        bind "Super w" { CloseTab; }
        bind "Super n" { NewTab; }
    }
}

// macOS specific
copy_command "pbcopy"
copy_on_select false

[dbritto-dev]

@romanzipp everything works for me except that zellij does not run fish at start so I need to type fish, do you know how to fix that?