The Start of Yazelix

Kintsugi is the japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with a paste dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. It represents the embracing of the flawed or imperfect, highlighting cracks and repairs as events in the life of an object, rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage.

The origin of Yazelix certainly relates to that, in the sense that I deeply missed having a sidebar/filetree in helix. Yazelix started as a response to a Reddit interaction, where I saw the opportunity of doing something similar to the OP but using zellij as a multiplexer instead of kitty, since I was already using zellij.

Zellij is superb, but using Helix with it created another set of problems, namely keybinding conflicts. So I fixed them also, using yazelix, instead of giving up.

And then one day I got tired of having to install all my tools whenever I distrohopped/changed OS, so I nixified Yazelix, reducing the number of dependencies to near zero.

And somewhere along the way I got tired of configuring starship, mise, zoxide too, same as above, so yazelix auto-configures this for me.

And I wondered if I could add support for more shells, and terminal emulators, so I did that. Someone wanted to use fish. Now they have it.

And I wondered if I could have a welcome screen with some art in it, and some info from the yazelix build process, etc, so I built it.

And then I needed a better tab bar, and more customization, so I replaced the tab bar with zjstatus, a great zellij plugin.

And on and on.

Now using yazelix feels extremely good to me, and I get the feeling the project is getting some traction, with a constant rhythm of github stars growth, and getting known by more people. And if others find joy in using yazelix, that’s enough for me.

Desire is pain, and yazelix came from desire, from imagining something that did not exist the way I wanted. A nagging in my mind, asking “what if”. What if I could do this? And that? I have this vision, is it feasible? Can I do this in a more elegant way? Or rather, let me try it and see what happens.

Building through yazelix feels like painting a work of art to me, although I have bad actual artistic skills. The pleasure of bringing idea to reality, and crafting something that feels smart. Few things come close to it.

Much like a broken cup, that got mended with gold into something superior, that’s what yazelix is to me, and hopefully not only to me.

There’s much to be done yet. Infinite possibilities. But some rather closer than far. I’d love to have you join me on this ride.