How to resume a tmux session after restarting your terminal

Otty can restore your previous terminal layout and reattach tmux sessions after restart, so long-running work comes back where you left it.

If you use tmux to keep development sessions alive, the best terminal restart is the one that does not make you rebuild your workspace. Otty's session recovery can reopen your previous windows, tabs, splits, working directories, and scrollback, then reattach the tmux session behind a restored pane.

The short setup

Keep On Launch set to Restore Last Session.
Keep Restore Multiplayer enabled under Settings -> Shell -> Session Restore.
Start tmux normally, for example tmux new -A -s work.
Quit or restart Otty.
Open Otty again and the restored pane reattaches to the tmux session instead of starting over.

tmux new -A -s work is useful because it is idempotent: if the session exists, tmux attaches to it; if it does not, tmux creates it.

Why this works

tmux keeps the actual shell processes alive in a tmux server. Otty restores the terminal shape around that server: the app window, tab, split pane, working directory, scrollback, and the fact that the pane was connected to a multiplexer session.

When Restore Multiplayer is on, Otty treats tmux as a live session to reattach, not as a one-off command to blindly replay. That is safer than rerunning arbitrary commands and closer to what tmux users expect.

A practical workflow

Start a named tmux session for a project:

tmux new -A -s otty-work

Run your editor, dev server, logs, tests, or code-agent shells inside tmux. If Otty restarts after an update, crash, reboot, or clean launch with restore enabled, Otty brings back the terminal workspace and reconnects to the tmux session.

What Otty restores

The Otty window and tab layout.
Split panes and pane titles.
Working directories.
Scrollback where available.
tmux multiplexer sessions when Restore Multiplayer is enabled.

What tmux still owns

tmux owns the live shell processes, tmux windows, tmux panes, and programs running inside the tmux server. Otty owns the native terminal app state around it.

That division is the point: tmux keeps long-running work alive, while Otty makes the native terminal restart feel continuous.