Session persistence

Understand what Zync restores across restarts, how SSH terminals reconnect, and which terminal metadata is saved locally.

Zync saves the shape of your workspace so you can continue after restarting the app. It restores sidebar tabs, terminal tabs, active selections, split layouts, and terminal metadata. It does not restore a running process or terminal output from a previous app process.

What is saved

Session state is stored locally in session.json in Zync’s app data directory. It can include:

Sidebar tabs, their order, the active tab, and the active connection.
Terminal tabs for the local scope and each SSH host.
The active terminal in each scope.
Split and dock layouts, including shell and Files panes.
Terminal titles, selected shell, initial path, synced-terminal state, and last known working directory.

Zync saves after meaningful tab and layout changes. Working-directory updates are saved shortly after they settle, so a series of cd commands does not trigger a write for every character.

What returns after restart

On launch, Zync loads connections and settings before restoring the session. This prevents the tab bar from briefly showing an empty workspace.

Local terminal tabs can start their shells as they are restored. SSH tabs return as saved metadata and layout, but they do not open a network connection automatically.

Reconnect an SSH terminal

Select the restored SSH host in the sidebar.
Open its terminal view.
Select Reconnect in the disconnected terminal surface, or press Enter when that surface has focus.
After the connection succeeds, the saved SSH terminal tabs become live again.

This explicit reconnect avoids unexpected network connections when Zync starts. If the host no longer exists in your saved connections, its orphaned terminal scope is skipped.

Working directory behavior

Zync records the last known working directory when the shell reports it, commonly through OSC 7. Compatible shells and prompt tools may provide this automatically.

The saved directory is metadata for the session, ghost suggestions, and related context. It is not used to reopen a terminal in that directory on restore. A restored shell starts through the normal local or SSH shell flow, then reports its current directory when available.

For more about terminal behavior and path completion, see Terminal and Ghost suggestions. Read Split panes for the layout model stored in the session snapshot.

Tabs and views that are transient

Settings editor views are not restored as session tabs. Other supported workspace tabs, including the snippets workspace, can be restored from the session snapshot. If a persisted view value is no longer valid, Zync falls back to the terminal view.

The session snapshot is bounded per scope. If a scope has more terminal tabs than the restore limit, Zync keeps the tabs needed by the saved visible split layouts first.