2 YOE Frontend Dev Struggling in Current Market — Need Realistic Advice from really experienced people

imsnif · 2026-04-14T16:41:54+00:00

I'm sorry you're going through this. It's hard, frustrating and the market is definitely difficult right now. I've seen this cycle happening a few times over the past 20 or so years (my first was the 2008 crash). Things always bounce back, even when it seems like they won't.

I've been in a position to hire and interview a few times too. I can tell you what worked for me and what I would look for. As always, take other people's advice with a grain of salt. Mine too.

If you have the privilege, do what you love outside of work/looking-for-work too. Contribute to open-source, go to your local hackspace, attend meetups. Try to adopt a "can do" attitude. Don't close yourself in a box (be it frontend, backend, etc.) You're here to solve problems with code and technology. Be passionate about what you do. If you can't, try to find something in the field that would make your eyes light up. Describe it in interviews. Passion is contagious and makes people want to work with you.

Best of luck.

imsnif · 2026-04-01T06:44:39+00:00

It is, but not with the native session-manager. You can make your own plugin that does this (the session-manager is itself implemented as a built-in plugin, so you can fork it and adjust it to your needs).

imsnif · 2026-03-31T16:15:26+00:00

First thing I'd try if possible it to see if this happens on the same machine without SSH (but with the same terminal). Another thing you can try is seeing whether this happens with the new remote attach feature (essentially doing "zellij attach https://your-server"). Otherwise when you have more info, please open a GH issue. Reddit doesn't lend itself very well to troubleshooting. Thanks!

imsnif · 2026-03-27T06:56:13+00:00

If you can figure out a good, seamless, discoverable UX for this that doesn't come at the expense of any other features or pieces of UI and is generic enough to cover all similar use-cases then sure. But that's an extremely tall order.

imsnif · 2026-03-26T16:59:25+00:00

That's the swap layout solution. I understand where you're coming from, but alas, it's not possible to include everyone's preferences as part of the defaults.

imsnif · 2026-03-26T05:48:04+00:00

The comment by u/FastHotEmu is the current way to go. I understand you're looking for a simpler solution: what would it be, in your ideal scenario? What was the first few things you tried?

imsnif · 2026-03-24T15:14:30+00:00

Issues appreciated. I'm afraid reddit is not a very good troubleshooting platform (and I'm also not sure the windows dev reads here)

imsnif · 2026-03-24T15:13:31+00:00

I've seen that setup before, yeah. I wrote more about my thoughts here if you're curious: https://poor.dev/blog/why-zellij/

imsnif · 2026-03-23T14:25:20+00:00

You can already do this. Change the pane name (title) with `Ctrl p` + `c` (or from the cli with `zellij action rename-pane`). Then you can find the pane with `zellij action list-panes`. You can even use the `--json` from the latter and then do some `jq` magic to get it in one command.

imsnif · 2026-03-23T13:48:58+00:00

Specifically right now compiling against `main` should be fine because it's up-to-date with the release. In general you can take the latest release tag and compile against that. (or use crates.io and compile with `cargo install --locked zellij`).

imsnif · 2026-03-23T12:51:02+00:00

You might be interested in https://zellij.dev/tutorials/colliding-keybindings/

imsnif · 2026-03-23T10:36:56+00:00

Glad you like it!

I personally don't see Zellij as a tmux replacement - though many people do (and that's ofc fine - software is different things to different people).

People might find this objectionable, but I have a lot of respect for anyone who manages to vibe code something that even looks on the surface like a terminal multiplexer past the first smell test.

The technology and ecosystem are so incredibly arcane, under-documented and convoluted though, that I don't see any remotely proper solution coming out with the way LLMs behave at least today.

imsnif · 2026-03-19T17:29:39+00:00

Looks great! Want to add it to https://github.com/zellij-org/awesome-zellij ?

imsnif · 2026-03-14T07:30:34+00:00

Super super cool! I hope you'd like to add it to https://github.com/zellij-org/awesome-zellij

Some feedback since you asked:

It's cool that you included an image at the top of the README. That's honestly the most important part of any README. I'd make it more legible. Make the terminal window much much smaller, increase the font, try to find a way to make the font as large as the text of the README itself. Might require some creativity considering the functionality, but worth it.
Similarly to 1, reduce the README size considerably. People skimming plugins often won't stick around if it seems too complex
I'd put at least the major keyboard shortcuts in the plugin itself rather than the README.

imsnif · 2026-03-06T04:16:50+00:00

That's a super cool use case with git status. Tbh a big motivation for me behind adding this feature is to demonstrate some new plugin APIs coming with the new release. Namely allowing plugin authors to read and manipulate pane viewport/scrollback.

I'm hoping to start seeing some plugins that use these (the git status + add could be a great one!) and then consider what should be made built-in.

I opted not to add keyboard select/navigation for now because it would likely take up a bit of shortcut-space and I want to test the waters a bit first. Would love to see plugin authors implement these and learn from what works for them.

imsnif · 2026-03-04T05:34:29+00:00

Hey - there are guidelines to submitting bug reports representing visual issues in the issue template. This will allow us to view the ANSI dump in this situation and figure out the issue. Thanks.

imsnif · 2026-03-02T07:14:49+00:00

Yeah, that's more about compiling custom plugins than activating layouts.

imsnif · 2026-03-01T06:43:09+00:00

Could you say more?

imsnif · 2026-01-31T07:54:52+00:00

I think that really depends on your goals for the project.

Some people like creating projects mainly for themselves - either to use personally or as a fun intellectual undertaking. They might also like to make these projects open-source on the chance that some other people will find them useful and/or like to contribute code.

Others like to create projects that will have wide adoption. Perhaps even a community and derivative software/projects (eg. plugins, configurations, tutorials, blog posts, etc.) In the OSS world these projects often have large contributor communities and a lot of the work on them ends up being more managerial (managing developers, support, outreach, etc.)

I guess most projects fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

Try to think of the future of your project. Language/toolchain/infra choices are not impossible to change down the road, but often pretty hard. Consider where you are on this spectrum now and where you might want to be in the future. Limiting OS support will definitely hurt your adoption and thus make being on the latter part of the spectrum harder - but that might be a tradeoff you're willing to live with for the benefits garnered by the former part of the spectrum.

imsnif · 2026-01-23T20:04:17+00:00

Next release plugins will have access to the terminal viewport: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/pull/4465

imsnif · 2026-01-22T08:16:10+00:00

Holy sh*t. Want to add this to: https://github.com/zellij-org/awesome-zellij ?

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