The shell (hearth)

hearth is the cozy terminal room. It sets up the whole command-line experience — the terminal emulator, the multiplexer, the shell, the prompt, the file manager, the editor, and a toolbelt of modern CLI replacements — every one of them painted in nebelung colours.

The stack

Layer	Tool	Notes
Terminal	Ghostty	font size 19, title bar hidden, auto-attaches to zellij
Multiplexer	zellij	custom tab bar + status bar, grid/spiral/columns layouts
Shell	zsh	framework-free, fzf-tab, sensible history, declarative Git aliases
Prompt	starship	nebelung-tinted
File manager	yazi	markdown & code previews, image previews via chafa
Editor	helix	the default $EDITOR, nebelung theme
Jumper	zoxide	frecency cd, cdi for an fzf picker

Plus a themed toolbelt: bat (aliased over cat), lsd (over ls), lazygit (lg), claude (c), delta for git diffs, fzf, fd, jq, gh, glow, fastfetch, and nix-index + comma so you can run any nixpkgs command on demand.

Git aliases

Hearth uses plain zsh—no shell framework—and supplies a finite set of Git shortcuts directly. The names follow the broadly used Oh My Zsh-style vocabulary where conventions agree, while deliberately avoiding ambiguous shortcuts such as gl, gr, and gs, whose meanings differ between popular alias sets.

Area	Aliases
Add	ga, gaa, gapa
Branch / checkout / clone	gb, gba, gbd, gbD, gbm, gco, gcb, gcl, gsw, gswc
Commit / cherry-pick	gc, gca, gcam, gcmsg, gcn, gcp, gcpa, gcpc
Diff / log	gd, gds, gdw, glo, glog, gloga
Fetch / merge	gf, gfa, gfo, gm, gma, gmc, gmff
Pull / push	gpl, gpr, gp, gpf, gpsup
Rebase / repository	grb, grba, grbc, grbi, grbs, grt, grv
Status / stash	gst, gss, gsb, gsta, gstl, gstp, gsts
Tag / worktree	gt, gwt, gwta, gwtl, gwtr

g itself is git. Add, replace, or remove shortcuts per host with nebelhaus.git.shellAliases:

nebelhaus.git.shellAliases = {
  gst = "git status --short --branch"; # replace
  gsync = "git pull --rebase --autostash"; # add
  gco = null; # remove
};

Ghostty opens into zellij

Launching Ghostty drops you straight into a persistent zellij session called main. New panes and tabs inherit your working directory. A few conveniences:

• Ghostty’s ⌘T, ⌘P, ⌘Y, ⌘C and friends are unbound on purpose — zellij owns those, so the same keys work whether or not you’re multiplexed.
• Ctrl-Tab / Ctrl-Shift-Tab walk your tabs in most-recently-used order, browser-style — one tap bounces between your two hottest tabs; keep tapping to go further back. (Ghostty forwards the kitty-protocol encoding so zellij sees them.)

zellij keybindings

Keys	Action
Super P	New pane, inheriting cwd — but a shell born inside a claude --worktree checkout hops to the repo’s main checkout
Super ⇧P	New pane, stay here — inherits cwd with no hop, so you get a shell right inside the worktree
Super T	New tab at $HOME — born named ~ (fresh tabs are never Tab #N)
Super ⇧T	New tab at the focused pane’s directory — with the same worktree hop as Super P
Super F	Fullscreen the focused pane — zoom it to fill the tab, tap again to drop back into the tiled layout
Super R	Reload the terminal stack — gracefully quit/reopen Ghostty, then start a fresh zellij server with the same tabs, panes and working directories; live Claude Code panes resume their exact conversations
Super Y	yazi peek — a floating browser with live previews; Enter on a directory opens a new tab there
Super ⇧Y	yazi jump — browse, then drop a shell in the landing directory
Ctrl Tab / Ctrl ⇧Tab	Tab history back / forward (most-recently-used)
Alt < / Alt >	Cycle swap layouts (grid → spiral → columns)

The reload is also available as zreload from a shell. It prepares the recovery layout inside zellij, then hands the quit/delete/reopen sequence to a launchd agent outside the terminal, so killing the old server cannot strand its own script. This is a real Ghostty quit and relaunch, not reload_config: that action only reparses Ghostty settings and would leave the old launcher process alive. Each zellij server generation keeps an explicit pane-to-Claude-session manifest, so a foreground tool such as sourcekit-lsp cannot be mistaken for the pane that launched it. If any active command pane cannot be proven resumable, reload stops before quitting Ghostty or deleting the session.

Option-click a path

A custom zellij link handler means Option-clicking a file path in the terminal opens a new tab already cd’d there. Great for jumping into a path a build tool just printed.

Layouts

zellij ships three swap layouts, cycled with Alt < / Alt >:

• Grid (default) — the most balanced square arrangement, every pane equal area.
• Spiral — balanced 50/50 nesting, largest pane top-left.
• Columns — equal full-height columns side by side.

yazi previews

yazi is set up for fast previewing: markdown renders through glow, code through bat (syntax-highlighted), and images through chafa near-fullscreen inside zellij. Press Y to copy a file’s contents (not just its path), and Esc to close a floating peek. In the Super Y peek overlay, Enter on a file pages it fullscreen while Enter on a directory opens a new zellij tab there (use l / → to descend into a directory without leaving peek) — so peek doubles as the browse-and-pick “new tab” chooser.

Choosing your editor

helix is the default. nebelhaus.hearth.editor is the one editor the rice uses everywhere — it’s your $EDITOR / $VISUAL, and it’s what every “open in an editor” action launches (the “Nix Config” palette command, the bar’s nix-open item, and the file-association hijack below). Those open the target in a new zellij tab running it, so a terminal editor is the natural fit; a GUI editor’s CLI works too. Set it in your host file:

nebelhaus.hearth.editor = "nvim";     # any terminal editor
# a GUI editor's CLI works too, e.g. "code" or "code -w" to block

One related knob:

• nebelhaus.hearth.hijackFileAssociations — off by default; when true, makes your editor the default opener for .json, .md, .ts, .nix, and similar via duti.

Handy shell touches

• zoxide — cd learns your habits; cdi opens an fuzzy picker of your frequent directories.
• Git aliases — a compact, framework-independent set (g, gst, gco, gcb, gp, gpf, grbi, gwt, …) ships built in — no oh-my-zsh. Add, override, or remove one with nebelhaus.git.shellAliases.
• Auto-renaming tabs — cd into a repo and the zellij tab renames itself after it; cd ~ renames it back to ~, the name every fresh tab is born with (no Tab #N anywhere).
• Claude Code aware — new shells opened (Super P / Super ⇧T) inside a ~/.cache/claude-worktrees checkout hop to the parent repo automatically — and the Super ⇧T tab is named after the main repo, not the throwaway worktree. Want a shell inside the worktree instead? Super ⇧P is the no-hop escape hatch.

See Theming & accents for how every tool above gets its colours, and the options reference for every hearth knob.