Restoring Your Workspace Layout After a Restart
Restoring Your Workspace Layout After a Restart. How pane trees, tabs, and session IDs serialize and come back exactly where you left them after a restart. Claims map to Ferryx docs and cited sources only.
What gets snapshotted
Most terminals tie process lifetime to a window. Close or crash the window and the agents die with it. A daemon-owned session survives GUI reloads, workspace restarts, and laptop sleep policies far better, because the processes never belonged to the window in the first place. In the specific case of “Restoring Your Workspace Layout After a Restart”, the Ferryx angle is straightforward: how pane trees, tabs, and session ids serialize and come back exactly where you left them after a restart. claims map to ferryx docs and cited sources only. Teams evaluating this often arrive from a shared-checkout pain story or from tooling that treats the terminal as a disposable window. Ferryx takes the opposite stance—sessions are daemon-owned, isolation is a first-class action, and everything you need to verify sits behind documented surfaces.
Binary pane trees
Ferryx runs a headless Rust PTY daemon that owns pseudoterminals independently of the GUI. Output sits in a 512 KiB ring buffer per session with monotonic sequence numbers, so reconnects replay exactly what was missed and report a gap if the buffer wrapped. Applied to “restore workspace layout”, that context matters because the failure modes people search for are almost always failures of ownership or visibility rather than of raw rendering. When the process outlives the window, when the buffer can prove what it missed, and when each agent’s files live in a jailed worktree, the same task that used to require three clones and a spreadsheet becomes a pane layout you can read at a glance.
Practical steps
- Run the daemon once per machine (bundled with the app, or
ferryx --daemonfor headless hosts). - Attach the GUI or remote client; the client is a consumer of daemon state, not the owner of processes.
- Close or reload the window freely—PTYs keep running and output continues into the ring buffer.
- Reattach and let sequence numbers replay the stream; if the buffer wrapped you get an explicit ReplayGap instead of silent corruption.
- For upgrades, prefer rolling handover so a draining predecessor keeps serving legacy sessions until they exit.
| Checkpoint | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Isolation | Each parallel actor has its own worktree or a documented reason not to |
| Visibility | Status badges or attention counters answer “who needs me?” without polling |
| Persistence | Closing the window does not end agent processes |
| Evidence | Claims map to product facts or a linked source |
How this fits Ferryx today
Ferryx ships calendar-versioned releases for macOS (universal DMG), Windows (x64 installer), and Linux (AppImage and .deb). The desktop shell, daemon, and optional ferryx-cli headless binary are described with sources on the product facts page. If you are new to the workspace model, start with the introduction; if you want the mechanical details of sessions and replay, read technical architecture.
Related reading:
FAQ
What happens if I quit the app?
The daemon keeps the PTYs alive. Relaunching reattaches and replays buffered output.
How much output is retained?
512 KiB per session in a ring buffer with monotonic sequence numbers; older output can wrap and is then reported as a gap.
Can more than one daemon own the socket?
A flock keeps a single canonical daemon per machine; legacy daemons drain rather than getting killed mid-upgrade.
Limits and non-goals
Ferryx is early software: core flows work, but expect rough edges and breaking changes between calendar-versioned releases. Some OS integrations remain platform-specific (Dock badge counters and launchd supervision are macOS-only today), Windows builds are not code-signed yet so SmartScreen warns on first run, and remote features assume you control the host and pairing grants. None of that changes the core claim of this post—daemon-owned sessions, managed worktrees, and visible multi-agent workflows—but it is the honest boundary of what has shipped. Verify anything version-sensitive against the facts page and the release notes before you standardise a team workflow on it. If something in this guide disagrees with your build, trust the repository sources linked from product facts and open an issue with your version string attached.
How to verify these claims
Every concrete statement in this post ties back to a checkable surface: package names and license terms live on product facts, session and buffer behaviour is described in technical architecture, and keyboard bindings are listed under shortcuts. Where a third-party tool is mentioned, treat vendor docs as authoritative for that tool and re-check dates before quoting them in a decision document. That discipline is why this site does not publish performance benchmarks it has not measured: reproducible architecture facts age better than marketing numbers.