Support for balancing/equalizing panes?

[bcspragu]

Hello!

Does Zellij have support for making all panes the same size or otherwise equalizing them? I notice when I create a bunch of panes in one direction, they end up looking like this:

And of course, I can manually resize these in pane mode, or create swap layouts, but sometimes I just want to rebalance my current layout, while keeping the relative positioning

I use this functionality in my window manager (bspwm), which supports both "equalizing" and "balancing", which it describes as:

-E, --equalize
   Reset the split ratios of the tree rooted at the selected node to their default value.
                                                                                                                  
-B, --balance
   Adjust the split ratios of the tree rooted at the selected node so that all windows occupy the same area.

I'd be up for contributing this if it doesn't exist and there's interest.

[imsnif]

IMO the best way to achieve something like this would be as you said through a swap layout. The cool thing about them is that you can "snap back" into them with your existing panes. So if you have a "balanced" swap layout and reach this stage, you can do Alt ] or Alt [ to snap the current pane state into the next swap layout and have them balanced.

Also, if you have a "balanced" swap layout you can probably use Alt n instead of horizontal splitting them and they will become balanced.

Indeed, even if we were to include such a feature in core, the cleanest way to implement it would be to use a swap layout internally anyway. So I very much recommend implementing it that way for your use case.