Terminal Lifecycle
Understand what PonyMux preserves when a process exits, and how snapshots, wake-up, Resume, Fork, Archive, Trash, and Restore work together.
A PonyMux Terminal is a durable work record, not just a live shell process. Its name, working directory, List, reaction, appearance, and session history remain available after the process inside it exits.
A shell or agent process is running.
The record and saved screen remain; no process is running.
The durable record is kept out of active collections until restored.
Active and sleeping Terminals
Here, active describes the Terminal’s lifecycle: it has not been archived or trashed. An active Terminal is sleeping when its saved record still exists but no shell, agent, or other program is currently running inside it.
This normally happens after you quit and reopen PonyMux, or when the Terminal’s
shell exits—for example, after you run exit or press Control-D. Switching to
another Terminal, hiding the window, or leaving PonyMux in the background does
not put it to sleep; its shell, agent, or development server keeps running.
Sleeping does not delete the Terminal. PonyMux keeps its metadata, working directory, session history, and last captured screen so the workspace can be restored without keeping every process alive forever.
When PonyMux has a screen snapshot, selecting a sleeping Terminal shows the saved text immediately. If its latest conversation can be resumed and automatic resume is enabled, PonyMux starts a short countdown. You can resume immediately, pause the countdown by interacting with the snapshot, or type to start a plain shell instead.
Automatic resume can be changed in Settings → General.
Session history
Open Sessions (⌥⌘V) for the selected Terminal. Consecutive segments of the
same conversation—including a continuation after context compaction—stay together
as one session row. The row can include the provider, model, effort, recent recap,
context size, and last request time when the provider transcript contains them.
Resume
Resume continues an existing conversation in the selected Terminal. If another program is running there, PonyMux warns that resuming will end it and restart the Terminal first.
Resume is unavailable when the provider transcript is no longer present on disk.
Fork
Fork branches from an existing conversation. You can fork in the current Terminal or create a new Terminal for the branch. A session must have saved some conversation before it can be forked.
Archive, Trash, and Restore
- Archive removes a Terminal from active collections while keeping it available for later recovery.
- Trash marks a Terminal for deletion and keeps it in the Trash collection until it is restored or deleted permanently.
- Restore returns an archived or trashed Terminal to All Terminals or to a List.
- Delete Forever permanently removes the Terminal record and revokes its delivered and pending notifications.
Archive and Trash are read-only views for Terminal details. Drag a Terminal back to All Terminals or a List to restore it, or use the Terminal action menu.