Restore and resume

If your tmux server crashes or your machine reboots, tmux-ide restore rebuilds your tmux sessions from the last snapshot: windows, split layouts, working directories and pane titles. With --resume-agents, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and opencode panes can reopen their previous conversation.

It works from a snapshot at ~/.tmux-ide/snapshot.json, which the background updater writes about every 30 seconds. The updater runs once any session is adopted or created from the app, so a snapshot exists only if it was running before the crash.

What restore rebuilds

tmux-ide restore

For each session in the last snapshot, restore rebuilds:

• every window,
• the split layout of each window,
• per-pane working directories,
• per-pane titles, and
• re-adopts the sessions that were adopted (their tmux chrome returns).

If a session belongs to a project with a workspace config, restore relaunches it from that config instead of rebuilding it from the snapshot.

Preview and safety defaults

Restore never clobbers work in progress:

• An already-live session with the same name is skipped, never overwritten.
• Recorded pane commands are not auto-run. By default a rebuilt agent pane is a plain shell in the right directory with its title restored — you decide what to relaunch. Pass --run-commands to replay the recorded commands.

Preview the plan without touching tmux:

tmux-ide restore --dry-run
tmux-ide restore --dry-run --json

Resume Claude Code and other agent conversations

Restore can also bring back agent conversations, not only the panes. With --resume-agents, an agent pane that recorded an @agent_session_id relaunches with that agent's resume command. You get the conversation back instead of a fresh shell.

tmux-ide restore --resume-agents

You can make this the default in ~/.tmux-ide/config.json:

{
  "restore": {
    "resumeAgents": true
  }
}

Support per agent

A pane resumes only when tmux-ide knows that agent's resume command and captured the pane's session id while the agent ran. Support differs by agent:

Check what's active on your machine:

tmux-ide integration status

For an agent in the table whose id isn't captured automatically, such as Copilot CLI, the agent can record its own id; it then resumes like the rest:

tmux set-option -p @agent_session_id <its-session-id>

Capture never overwrites: an id stamped by an integration (or by the agent itself) is left alone. Codex/Cursor capture runs inside the chrome updater, so it is active whenever any session is adopted.

Snapshot cadence

How often the snapshot is written is part of the updater config in ~/.tmux-ide/config.json:

{
  "updater": {
    "tickMs": 2000,
    "snapshotEvery": 15
  }
}

A snapshot is written every snapshotEvery ticks (default: every 15 ticks of 2s ≈ every 30 seconds). See Configuration.

See also

• Agent detection — how @agent_session_id is recorded
• Worktrees — isolated sessions per branch, restored too
• Troubleshooting — when there is no snapshot
• CLI reference — every restore flag