Feature: ability to create layout file from current layout

[wheresvic]

Hello and thank you for making Zellij! Looks awesome and I'm looking to start using it daily.

One thing that would certainly make my life easier is if I could configure zellij layout and then export the layout file so I have the same layout on my work system.

Cheers!

[a-kenji]

Thank you for the suggestion, this would be awesome!

[AjiBuster499]

Hi, I'm a CS student looking to get some Rust experience, and I would like to take this on, if that is okay. I think I know of a way to solve the issue at hand.

[AjiBuster499]

After reading through the code, I have a question.

This functionality looks like it's already in place in the DumpScreen action, but it's not set in the default config anywhere. Why is this?

My basic idea was to take the current layout residing in memory and just dump it to a file/stdin, but while looking for the holder of said layout, I found DumpScreen, which does exactly this, but it's not anywhere in the default.yaml as a keybind.

[a-kenji]

The DumpScreen action doesn't interact with the layout, it is a misnomer. It doesn't dump the screen, it dumps the content of the currently specified pane (not the screen) inside of a specified file. It is not bound by default, because it depends heavily on the usecase, if it is useful for you.

[vodrazka]

This would be awesome

[min2sia]

Just spent an hour trying to figure out how to lay out my current session with 3 tabs into a .kdl file :)
This export would come very handy.

[Lockszmith-GH]

Chiming in on this as well. This would be a great feature.

[franalbani]

Read https://zellij.dev/documentation/session-resurrection#session-files-in-the-cache and try find ~/.cache/zellij/ -iname '*.kdl'.

[Lockszmith-GH]

Almost there. Instead of automated, having it on-demand would be awesome.

I would prefer to have the auto-generate/caching feature turned off, and be able to call zellij with a command line action to that would dump the current layout into the file of my choice.

[imsnif]

This is possible with zellij action dump-layout since 0.39, sorry - I still need to document it.