Session Recovery

Otty remembers what you had open. Closed tabs come back, crashed windows restore.

Reopen Closed

Action	Binding
Reopen the last closed tab, pane, or window	⇧⌘T
Browse recent sessions & folders	File → Open Recent…

⇧⌘T walks back through whatever you closed most recently — a single split pane, a whole tab, or an entire window — restoring it into the window it came from. History persists across app launches: Otty keeps your last 12 closed items, and Open Recent separately lists your 10 most recent sessions and folders.

Recover session when start Otty

Otty restores your previous session automatically — there's no "do you want to restore?" dialog. What you get on launch depends on how the last session ended:

• After a clean quit — governed by the on-launch setting. With the default on-launch = restore_session, every window from your last session reopens with its tabs, splits, working directories, and scrollback. Set on-launch = new_window to always start with one empty window instead.
• After a crash or force-quit — Otty always restores the last snapshot, regardless of on-launch. Snapshots are written continuously (see Crash recovery), so you land within seconds of where you were. If Otty crashes repeatedly on launch, it stops auto-restoring after a few attempts and starts fresh to break the loop.
• After an in-place update — relaunching from an update always restores, so updating never costs you your layout.

Config what to recover

How much of a pane comes back — a live multiplexer session, a coding-agent transcript, the command it was running — is up to you, under Settings → Shell → Session Restore:

Option	What restoring brings back
Restore Multiplayer	Reattaches a multiplexer session (tmux today) instead of opening a fresh shell, so its windows and panes come back live. On by default.
Restore Code Agents	Resumes the Claude / Codex / OpenCode session the pane was running, rather than dropping you at a plain prompt. On by default.
Re-run Processes on Restore	Whether the command a pane was running is re-launched — see below.

Re-running commands

By default a restored pane returns as a clean shell: the split layout and working directory come back, but nothing runs on its own. The Re-run Processes on Restore dropdown decides what — if anything — Otty re-launches:

Choice	What happens
None (default)	Nothing is re-run — just the shell and its directory.
Whitelisted only	A command is re-run only if it matches your Command Whitelist.
All running processes	Every pane re-launches whatever it was running.

Choosing Whitelisted only reveals a Command Whitelist row; click Configure… to edit the list. Entries match as whitespace-delimited prefixes — npm run dev also covers npm run dev --port 3000 — so you can whitelist the long-running commands you trust to relaunch (dev servers, file watchers) while leaving one-shot or destructive commands off.

Crash recovery

If Otty exits unexpectedly, the next launch offers to restore your open windows from the last known snapshot. Snapshots are written whenever a tab is created, closed, or its layout changes — so at worst you lose seconds of state.

Recipes vs recovery

Recovery is automatic and short-term. Recipes are intentional, portable, and can include command replay.

See also

• Recipes
• Configuration Reference — on-launch, session-restore-processes, session-log-mode, etc.