zz

zz is tmux, ghostty and gpui love triangle

Is it any good?

Yes.

In math notation:

zz := gpui(tmux ∪ ghostty)

Features

A multiplexer that ships as a native GPU app. A background daemon owns your sessions, so closing the window detaches instead of killing your work.

• tmux superset implemented in Rust, bring your .tmux.conf and muscle memory.
• Remote machines over plain ssh. Their sessions, windows, and panes sit in the same control plane.
• Browser panes: a real Chromium composited on the same surface as your terminals, split and targeted like any other pane.
• macOS, Linux (Wayland). Experimental Windows and WSL support.
• Browser client with the shared GPUI interface: build and run.

Pty Benchmarks

zz core is at least ~8x faster than tmux + any terminal emulator

macOS · Metal — Apple M4 Max

terminal	cat-ascii (MB/s)	cat-unicode (MB/s)	doom-fire (fps)
zz	328	98	668
ghostty-tip	294	94	650
cmux	285	86	627
kero	273	x	x
ghostty	94	69	630
iterm2	87	x	x
ghostty+tmux	44	19	194
rio	28	30	125

Linux · Vulkan — AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Radeon 7900 XTX, Wayland

terminal	cat-ascii (MB/s)	cat-unicode (MB/s)	doom-fire (fps)
zz	645	81	1285
ghostty-tip	637	61	1216
rio	487	124	1191
alacritty	129	91	1255
ghostty	98	45	653
limux	94	54	618
ghostty+tmux	56	17	201

Median of 5 runs at 180×50. cat-ascii and cat-unicode are throughput, doom-fire is frame rate; higher is better. x means crashed or timed out. Reproduce with bench/run.sh and bench/summarize.sh.

Install

One command on macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux:

curl -fsSL https://zzmux.sh/install.sh | sh
curl -fsSL https://zzmux.sh/install.sh | sh -s -- --headless   # CLI + daemon only, for hosts you ssh into

It picks the route for the machine: the notarized app into /Applications with zz linked on your PATH, the .deb through apt where dpkg runs, and the release tarball under ~/.local everywhere else. Add -s -- --beta for the newest beta, --version 0.3.0 to pin one; rerun to upgrade.

Or through a package manager. macOS, Apple Silicon:

brew install --cask demfabris/zz/zz

AUR:

paru zz-bin

Betas ship to their own channel, demfabris/zz/zz@beta and zz-beta-bin, which stable releases also update. Each conflicts with its stable sibling, so pick one.

Debian/Ubuntu 24.04+, from a release .deb:

sudo apt install ./zz-<version>-linux-<arch>.deb

Development

Install just 1.52 or newer. Run just to browse command groups, just web to list browser commands, or just --list --list-submodules for the full tree. Related commands use just <group> <action> [arguments]; run, watch, and build stay at the root.

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.97.0
• Zig 0.16.0
• CMake 3.21+ and Ninja: the CEF C++ wrapper is compiled from source.
• Linux: cmake curl desktop-file-utils ninja-build libfontconfig-dev libwayland-dev libx11-xcb-dev libxcb1-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev.
• Windows x64: Git for Windows (including Git Bash), the MSVC Rust toolchain, and Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with the C++ tools and a Windows SDK.

just build mac
just install mac
just package mac
just package arch
just install arch
just package deb
just install deb
just web run
just web build --release

On Windows, build from PowerShell:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts/build-windows.ps1

The script loads the x64 Visual Studio environment and selects Microsoft's linker explicitly to avoid Git Bash's link.exe. It runs just build windows, producing the complete app at dist/zz/zz.exe. Keep the adjacent DLLs and resources with the executable. To package the bundle:

powershell -File scripts/package-windows.ps1 dist/zz dist/zz-windows.zip

Before rebuilding an existing bundle, close its app and stop its daemon after finishing your sessions: Windows cannot replace DLLs that those processes have loaded.

Connecting

The sidebar shows every machine you have added, each expanding into its own sessions, windows, and panes. Click a session to attach to it. Add one from the menu on your own machine's row, remove one from the menu on its own row, or from a shell:

zz fleet add desktop you@desktop
zz list-hosts
zz fleet remove desktop

Or directly in zz's config file:

host-desktop = ssh://you@desktop
host-gpu     = ssh://gpu-box:2222

Any verb runs on a host with --host before it, such as zz --host desktop list-panes -a, and zz --host all inspect -a reads every host at once. zz fleet sync shares zz's own ssh key across your machines so logins stop asking, and zz fleet install desktop installs or updates zz there.

Browser egress

Browser panes always render locally, but a pane opened while you are attached to a remote host sends its traffic back out through that host over ssh -D, so localhost:3000 is the dev server there. Set browser-egress = false to keep browsing local.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0.

What zz forks, bundles, and read on the way here is credited in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICE.md.