How to Save and Recreate Your Terminal Sessions Like a Pro (Without Wasting a Single Byte of RAM)

It always starts the same way.

You open a new terminal window.

Then another.

Then a third one, because you just need to tail a log on staging while running a container locally and checking logs on production (because of course the issue only happens there).

By noon, you’ve got nine tabs open.

By 3 p.m., your Mac’s fan sounds like it’s auditioning for Top Gun.

And by 6 p.m., you close everything to “start fresh tomorrow” — only to realize you’ve lost every session, every pane, and every half-typed command that was actually useful.

Let’s fix that.

The Goal

We want a way to:

1. Save terminal sessions so they can be restored exactly as they were.
2. Free up memory — no terminals idling in the background.
3. Resume later without losing context, even after reboot.

Essentially, we want to treat our terminal sessions like sleeping containers — quietly frozen on disk, instantly revivable.

The Old Way (and Why It’s a Trap)

Most of us leave terminals open “just in case.”

You tell yourself you’ll come back to that long-running test suite later. You won’t. It’ll just stay there, eating RAM like a quiet little parasite.

Closing the terminal kills the process, and there goes your entire debugging context. Your half-written command is gone. Your local docker-compose up session is gone. Your Zen is gone.

There has to be a better way — and there is.

Use tmux: The Tab Whisperer

If you’ve never used tmux, it’s a terminal multiplexer — which is a fancy way of saying “you can run multiple terminals inside one terminal.” But its real magic is this:

You can detach from a running session, close the Terminal app entirely, and come back later to pick up exactly where you left off.

Let’s set it up.

Step 1: Install it

# macos
brew install tmux

# linux (ubuntu)
sudo apt install tmux

# windows
scoop install tmux

Step 2: Start a named session

tmux new -s mysession

You’re now in your own little sandbox. Open more panes, split screens, SSH into servers — whatever you need.

Step 3: Detach

Hold Ctrl + b, then press d.

Now, you’re out.

The session keeps running quietly in the background. The Terminal window can close; your processes stay alive. No GUI memory, no noise.

Step 4: Come back later

tmux attach -t mysession

It’s like teleporting back to your workstation after a lunch break — exactly as you left it.

But Wait, I Want to Save Everything

You might be thinking, “That’s nice, but I want more. I want to snapshot my whole terminal universe and restore it even after reboot.”

Fair point.

That’s where tmux-resurrect comes in.

The Lazarus Trick: Bringing Sessions Back from the Dead

tmux-resurrect is a plugin that does exactly what its name promises — it resurrects your sessions from the grave.

Step 1: Install it

git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect ~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-resurrect

Step 2: Add this to your ~/.tmux.conf

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
run '~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-resurrect/resurrect.tmux'

Reload your tmux config or restart tmux.

Step 3: Save and restore

• To save: prefix + Ctrl-s
• To restore: prefix + Ctrl-r

(prefix means Ctrl+b unless you’ve changed it.)

It writes out everything — which panes you had, where they were, which directories they were in, and which commands were running. All that’s saved to a simple text file.

Now, if you reboot your Mac, you can restore everything with a single keystroke. No RAM wasted. No tabs left open. No chaos.

Optional Fancy Trick: Make It Automatic

You can even automate it so every time you detach, tmux saves your state:

run-shell ~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-resurrect/scripts/save.sh

Or use tmux-continuum, another plugin that automatically saves and restores sessions on startup. You’ll never again have to rebuild your environment after restarting your machine.

Bonus: If You Prefer GUI Restoration

If you’re not a tmux person and want something more visual, macOS Terminal and iTerm2 have their own tricks:

For macOS Terminal

• Set up your tabs as you like.
• Go to Shell → Save Window Group As…
• Later: Shell → Open Window Group → [your setup]

It won’t keep live processes, but it’s great for quickly recreating your layout.

And If You Want True Zero-RAM, Zero-State Perfection…

That’s what containers are for.

You can snapshot entire environments:

docker run -it --name=myenv ubuntu
# Work here
exit
docker start -ai myenv  # picks up right where you left off

Stopped containers consume no RAM. It’s like cryogenic sleep for your dev environments.

The Real Lesson Here

The terminal is your cockpit.

It shouldn’t be a disposable battlefield of tabs and forgotten sessions.

With tmux and its plugins, you get the calm of a pilot who knows every lever is where it should be — even after reboot.

TL;DR — The Quick Recipe

Closing Thoughts

I used to treat my terminal windows like plants — water them daily, keep them open, pray they don’t die.

Now, with tmux, I treat them like seeds — they can sleep quietly underground, ready to sprout whenever I need them.

And that, my friend, is how you turn your terminal chaos into calm — one resurrected session at a time.

Bonus: Let tmux-continuum Do It For You

If pressing Ctrl+b Ctrl+s feels like too much effort (and, honestly, it is), there’s an even smoother way.

As I mentioned, there is tmux-continuum — the plugin that takes tmux-resurrect and automates it.

It saves your sessions periodically and restores them automatically on startup. You don’t even have to think about it.

Step 1: Install tmux-continuum

git clone https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum ~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-continuum

Step 2: Add these lines to ~/.tmux.conf

set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect'
set -g @plugin 'tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum'
set -g @continuum-restore 'on'
run '~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-resurrect/resurrect.tmux'
run '~/.tmux/plugins/tmux-continuum/continuum.tmux'

Step 3: Reload tmux configuration

tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Now tmux will:

• Automatically save your sessions every 15 minutes (configurable).
• Restore everything on reboot or the next tmux launch.
• Keep your terminal state perfectly mirrored to disk.

It’s the kind of automation that feels invisible — until one day your laptop crashes, you reboot, and your entire workspace quietly reappears.

That’s when you realize you’ve reached terminal enlightenment.

Now have fun with tmux and the automatically saved terminal sessions!