TIL: How to Set up Layouts in Zellij That Use Direnv and Nix

TIL: How to Set up Layouts in Zellij That Use Direnv and Nix

I have been using Zellij for a while now. I tried to set up layouts for one of my personal projects. So that we could have tests and linting running and any other tasks we may want whilst doing development ¹.

However, I had an issue working out how to call commands that required direnv and nix to set up development environments. In my case, my nix dev shell installed the go-task tool to run tasks such as task lint or task tests. However the shell that zellij was running the commands in for the layout did not load my Nix dev shell, so the go-task binary was not available.

So to fix this, we need to do something like this layout.kdl:

layout {
    pane size=1 borderless=true {
        plugin location="zellij:tab-bar"
    }
    pane {
        command "fish"
        args "-c" "direnv exec . task lint"
    }
    pane {
        command "fish"
        args "-c" "direnv exec . task tests"
    }
    pane {
        command "docker-compose"
        args "up" "--build -d"
    }
}

Where the key being we need to execute the direnv environment i.e. direnv exec ., then we can run commands like normal. Where direnv .envrc file contains use flake. That’s it! If you want Zellij to use direnv and load your nix flake dev shell, you have to add a bit of boilerplate, which is not ideal but