Restore & resume

A tmux server death shouldn't cost you an afternoon. While tmux-ide is running, the chrome updater continuously writes a snapshot of your fleet to ~/.tmux-ide/snapshot.json. If the server dies, tmux-ide restore rebuilds everything it recorded.

What comes back

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 (the dock returns).

If a session already maps to a registry project with an ide.yml, restore relaunches from that config instead of a raw rebuild — the config is the source of truth.

Safety first

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 conversations

The strongest form of recovery brings the conversations back, not just the panes. When the Claude Code integration is installed, each agent pane carries a recorded @agent_session_id. With --resume-agents, a rebuilt Claude pane that has one relaunches as claude --resume <id> — reviving the actual conversation instead of opening a fresh shell.

tmux-ide restore --resume-agents

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

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

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 Theming & config.

See also

• Agent detection — how @agent_session_id is recorded
• Worktrees — isolated sessions per branch, restored too