Splits, Sessions & Persistence

Splits

Each terminal pane can be split side by side or stacked from the top-bar buttons, and the result can be split again — splits nest arbitrarily deep. Every pane gets its own shell, its own scrollback and its own tint. When exactly two panes are open a swap button appears between the split buttons.

Splitting always acts on the focused pane of the active host — the panel drawer if it is open, otherwise an open terminal tab. It never pops out a new window.

Split buttons are hidden for PSMux and tmux sessions, because the multiplexer owns layout there; use its own prefix bindings instead.

The agent can split and close too, with SplitActivePane and CloseActivePane. See the MCP Tool Reference.

A layout that works well in practice:

┌─────────────────────────┬───────────────┐
│                         │               │
│   agent (Claude Code)   │    build      │
│                         │               │
│                         ├───────────────┤
│                         │    logs       │
└─────────────────────────┴───────────────┘

Sessions

A session is one shell, tracked by the tab that owns it. A tab can hold several sessions and switch between them from the session picker in the top bar, or with Ctrl+PageDown / Ctrl+PageUp; only one is displayed at a time.

Plain-shell sessions are labelled from their shell with a per-shell sequence number — PowerShell 1, PowerShell 2, Ubuntu (WSL) 1. Multiplexed sessions are labelled PSMux (PowerShell): freight or tmux (Ubuntu (WSL)): express, after their workspace name.

Separately, every session carries an internal name — shown read-only as Terminal ID in the top bar — which is what the agent’s SwitchSession tool addresses it by. The form is T<tab>_<n>; restored sessions get T<tab>_R<n>, and the counter is shared across tabs, so the numbers are unique but not sequential per tab.

What persists across an editor restart

The plugin keeps a record for every tracked session. Records are autosaved about once a second whenever something changes, and again on shutdown, so a crash loses at most a second of layout changes. On the next editor start it rebuilds:

every tab’s session list, in order
each session’s shell profile and workspace mode
which session was active
the full split layout, nested splits included, with the splitter sizing weights
every pane’s tint
the panel drawer’s own session, tracked separately from the four tabs

What is not stored is terminal contents. Scrollback is not written to disk. In Plain Shell mode the shells respawn fresh; in PSMux or Tmux mode the live sessions re-attach and carry their scrollback with them, because the multiplexer kept them running.

Records are skipped on restore if their shell is no longer installed, or if their psmux workspace no longer exists on the psmux server.

Restore runs once

Restore happens a single time per editor process, at the first tab bootstrap. Closing and reopening the panel drawer within one editor session does not re-read the saved records — you get the live state, not a rewind. The drawer’s own restore is deferred until the first time you open it.

Where the state is written

Session records live in your per-project, per-user editor config:

<YourProject>/Saved/Config/WindowsEditor/EditorPerProjectUserSettings.ini

That file is not normally committed to source control, so terminal layouts are yours alone and will not follow a teammate who checks out the project. (Preferences you change on the settings page go to a sibling file — see the Settings Reference.)

Starting clean

To wipe every saved terminal layout, close the editor and delete the PersistedSessions entries from the [/Script/ConductorTerminal.ConductorTerminalSettings] section of that ini — or delete the whole file if you do not mind resetting your other per-user editor preferences with it.