Configurable ancestor-tab highlighting

[remo5000]

Context

Hi! The new nested sessions feature has really helped with my workflow -- I used to use terminal tabs to organize parallel zellij sessions. With nested sessions, I can now forgo the native tabs and rely on zellij to organize parallel sessions. Thank you so much for shipping this!

Idea

While I noticed that it was easy to lose track of which parent tab (in my case, a root tab denoted which workstream I was actively looking at). It would be really cool to visualize the "path" from the root tab all the way to your currently active session.

Here's a quick demo, with a somewhat contrived 3-layer example:

Screen.Recording.2026-10-06.at.10.20.38.PM.mov

Next steps

My implementation of this was roughly:

1. Add a configurable option for ancestor tab highlighting
2. Use simple defaults that are agreeable to most
3. Plumb the resolved configuration values through the rendering machinery.

Happy to open up a PR if this feature sounds useful. Thank you!

[imsnif]

Just to make sure I understand: you mean that instead of completely graying out the outer session's tab bar, we'll leave the focused tab partially highlighted?

[imsnif]

Alright, this makes sense. I'd be happy to accept a PR for this (on by default with a config parameter to disable it). As for coloring, let's use the existing theme color for highlighted tabs but dim it slightly.

[remo5000]

Awesome! I wanted to clarify some implementation details before I put up a PR.

Right now my implementation is config based:

• I've set up config options ribbon_ancestor_selected and ribbon_ancestor_unselected. This is the source of truth for what the ancestor highlight should be.
• When unspecified, ribbon_ancestor_unselected defaults to ribbon_unselected
• When unspecified, ribbon_ancestor_selected defaults to ribbon_selected but lightened halfway toward white

I think what you're getting at is that we should make it an all-in-one option. Maybe we can call it nested_session_ancestor_tab_highlight and give the user the following options:

• disabled
• dim (dims ribbon_selected halfway towards white)
• full (copies ribbon_selected)

lmk which approach you prefer! And thank you once again for the guidance

[imsnif]

Hey, yes. But let's make it a bit simpler, I don't think we need to be super configurable here. Just a nested_session_ancestor_tab_highlight true/false defaulting to true.

[remo5000]

#5700 its up!

[remo5000]

quick bump here 😅 (I'll keep it updated every now and then for conflicts as they come up!)