oz - Persisting tmux Sessions Across Reboots

Rebuilding sessions, windows, panes, and working dirs by hand on ever restart gets old fast, enter tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum.

Why two plugins

tmux-resurrect does the actual work. It writes your tmux state (sessions, windows, panes, layouts, working directories) to a text file and can rebuild everything from it. On its own it’s manual: prefix + Ctrl-s to save, prefix + Ctrl-r to restore.

tmux-continuum just automates resurrect. It triggers a save every 15 minutes and runs the restore when the tmux server starts fresh, like after a reboot.

Continuum is useless without resurrect, and resurrect without continuum means remembering to save before every shutdown. You want both.

Install

I use TPM. In tmux.conf:

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'

Reload the config, then prefix + I to install. Or from a shell:

~/.config/tmux/plugins/tpm/bin/install_plugins

Config

# save location (default is ~/.tmux/resurrect)
set -g @resurrect-dir '~/.config/tmux/resurrect'

# restore automatically when tmux starts
set -g @continuum-restore 'on'

# auto-save interval in minutes
set -g @continuum-save-interval '15'

# restore pane scrollback contents too
set -g @resurrect-capture-pane-contents 'on'

Without @continuum-restore 'on' continuum only auto-saves and you still have to restore manually after a reboot.

Gotcha: auto-save silently stops if status-right is set after TPM

Continuum runs its save timer by hooking into status-right. If your config sets status-right after the TPM run line, the hook gets wiped and auto-save stops. No error, nothing. Your saves just get stale.

I hit this because my theme block (status bar colors, clock in status-right) was below the TPM line. Fix: TPM init goes at the very bottom, after everything else.

# all other config, including status-right, goes above this
run '~/.config/tmux/plugins/tpm/tpm'

Verify

prefix + Ctrl-s shows “Tmux environment saved” in the status bar. Then:

ls ~/.config/tmux/resurrect/

There should be timestamped tmux_resurrect_*.txt files and a last symlink pointing at the newest one.

Heads up: the default save location is ~/.tmux/resurrect/, even if your config lives in ~/.config/tmux/. I went looking for the files next to my config and found nothing until I realized this. @resurrect-dir fixes it.

Running parallel AI agents

tmux was one of the first CLI programs I ever picked up. I didn’t expect it to become more useful over time, but in 2026 that’s exactly what happened: coding agents live in the terminal, and a terminal multiplexer turns out to be the obvious way to run a bunch of them side by side.

Which is the main reason I care about this now: I run multiple coding agents at once, Claude Code and opencode, each in its own tmux window, one per project. Usually split into a pane for the agent and a pane for a shell to check its work.

After a reboot everything comes back with each pane already in the right project directory, so resuming is just:

claude --continue    # most recent conversation in this directory
claude --resume      # pick from past sessions

opencode works the same way with opencode --continue.

With @resurrect-capture-pane-contents 'on' the agent’s last output is still in the scrollback after restore, which helps when deciding whether to continue or start over.

Don’t put the agents in @resurrect-processes though. Auto-relaunching them starts blank sessions. Let resurrect bring back the shells and directories, then resume each agent yourself.

Caveats

Running programs don’t come back by default, only shells and their directories. If you want specific ones relaunched:
```
set -g @resurrect-processes 'ssh ncmpcpp newsboat ranger'
```
Restore uses the last save, which can be up to 15 minutes old. If you just rearranged everything and are about to reboot, hit prefix + Ctrl-s first.

Conclusion

Resurrect saves and restores, continuum makes it automatic. Keep the TPM line at the bottom of your config or auto-save silently breaks. Now a reboot costs me a tmux and a couple of --continues instead of twenty minutes of setup.