Resuming after a restart

The Terminal screen is restored, not resurrected. That distinction explains everything you see when you reopen the app.

What comes back

• The arrangement: tabs, panels, divisions, sizes and titles.
• The history: the retained content is redrawn in the panel.
• The restoration notice: the restored panel receives a banner with the text --- session restored ---, so you do not mistake redrawn history for new output.

What does not come back

• The process. The previous session died with the app. What you have is a new session, with the history drawn over it. A command in progress does not continue; a development server that was running there does not come up on its own.

That is why the restoration banner exists: without it, redrawn history would look like a live process.

The history ceiling

The history kept for restoration is limited by bytes, in three layers: what each session can store, what is replayed back, and the total for storage. When the volume exceeds the limit, the oldest part is cut.

Practical consequences:

• Very long output does not come back whole — the beginning is the first to go.
• Sessions that write a lot (verbose builds, continuous logs) lose their start sooner.
• Cutting per workspace means a noisy session can affect what is left for the others.

When saving the state fails

If the session state cannot be written, the app warns with its own dialog — not with a generic error. A write failure means that panel will have no restoration: the new session is born without the previous history.

The failure dialog offers the path to the disk-space analyzer, because the common cause is space or data volume.

Tabs that leave the visible area

Tabs out of view go to rest and are rehydrated when you return to them. This reduces the cost of keeping many tabs open without closing anything — but the same rule applies: on return, you find the retained history, not the process.

Replay: what can go wrong

The history replay is guarded by a policy that avoids dumping an already-dead run’s screen into the history. When that protection does not cover the case, the visible effect is old history appearing in the middle of current output — if you see that, it is replayed history, not output from the process.

If restoration is not what you want

• Want to continue where you left off in a process? There is no path: the previous session does not come back. Recreate the session and continue from the state that is on disk.
• The panel does not open at all? See When the terminal does not open.