<-Back to all posts
Engineering3 min read

Sessions That Outlive the App, the Network and the Laptop Lid

Voltius runs every SSH session inside tmux or screen on the host by default. Kill the app, lose the Wi-Fi or close the lid: the build keeps running, and the tab comes back to it. On tmux 3.2+, it even scrolls and searches like a plain terminal.

SSHtmuxPersistent sessionsReliability

The worst moment in a terminal is the one where the connection drops during a long command. The command dies with the SSH session, and so does its output.

In Voltius that doesn't happen, because the command was never running in the SSH session to begin with.

The shell lives on the host

By default, every SSH tab runs its shell inside tmux on the host, or screen where there is no tmux. The SSH connection is only a window onto that session. When the window closes for any reason, the session and everything running in it carry on.

This is the default, not a setting you have to find. A connection can turn it off, and it works on dropbear servers too, so OpenWrt routers get it as well.

Your own tmux keeps working inside it. Voltius's wrapper keeps its socket and its prefix key to itself, so tmux ls lists your sessions, and tmux attach nests as you'd expect.

Kill the app, reopen it

Voltius restores the whole workspace when it starts: tabs, splits, scrollback, and the processes running in them.

Here a build is running when the app is force-quit. Reopen it, and the splits come back, the scrollback is there, and the build is still going, because it never stopped.

Lose the network, keep the session

When the link drops, the tab shows that it's disconnected and reconnects as soon as the network is back, including tabs that were restored while offline. It keeps trying through a long outage instead of giving up.

Typing exit is different: that ends the shell on purpose, so Voltius doesn't reconnect it.

Scrollback that behaves like a normal terminal

Running inside tmux used to cost you the terminal's own scrollback: the mouse wheel scrolled tmux's copy mode, selection stopped at the edge of the screen, and search couldn't see history.

On tmux 3.2 and newer, Voltius attaches in tmux's control mode instead. The terminal receives the pane's raw stream, so everything works as it does in a plain SSH session: native scrollback, drag selection that auto-scrolls past the viewport, Ctrl+F over the whole history, the mouse wheel, and mouse-driven apps.

Large bursts of output no longer get dropped on the way, either: the SSH stream now has flow control, so a command that floods the screen slows down to the terminal's pace instead of losing lines.

Older tmux versions keep the classic attach, with tmux's copy mode painted in your theme's selection colour.

On another device

With sync on, a live session isn't tied to the machine that opened it. Open the same terminal on a second device and both stay live, mirrored in real time. That's covered in One Live Terminal on All Your Devices.

Try Voltius

Bring the workflow into the app.

Voltius is open source, local-first, and available without creating an account.