Embedded is a lot different, to be sure. I'm surprised there's room for tmux on something that tiny.
But on desktop systems, on my Mac, Zellij takes 28MB of disk and 40MB of RAM. That's 1/37,000th of my available disk and 1/1,600th of my RAM. I'm all for optimized, tiny apps, but those are below my attention threshold.
> I'm surprised there's room for tmux on something that tiny.
A question that comes to mind is, under what circumstances would you expect a TUI based program that processes streaming text not to fit on a system that is otherwise capable of user interaction? It seems vaguely in the vicinity of the simplest possible interactive task you could come up with.
Certainly it generally isn't worth hyper-optimizing mainstream desktop applications to wring out the last few MB, let alone KB, of RAM in this day and age. However that doesn't answer the question - why would more than 1 MB of program binary be required for multiplexing text in a terminal? At least at first glance it honestly seems a bit outlandish.
Note that "embedded" like this includes e.g. many modern routers.
Also note that computers with much less disk space than 128 Mb could and did run full-fledged GUI apps in the past. For example, the entirety of Windows 95 is ~100 Mb when installed.
The product uses libevent and libc already, so adding tmux only consumes a few hundred KiB in the image. The root filesystem is squashfs, so it's even less in practice.
But on desktop systems, on my Mac, Zellij takes 28MB of disk and 40MB of RAM. That's 1/37,000th of my available disk and 1/1,600th of my RAM. I'm all for optimized, tiny apps, but those are below my attention threshold.