WezTerm Sessions

The WezTerm Sessions is a Lua script enhancement for WezTerm that provides functionality to save, load, restore, edit and delete terminal sessions.

Note

While layout saving/loading/restoring should work on Windows, all new functionality are tested only on Linux. Processes restoring, state editing etc... are supported only on Linux and (untested) on macOS.

Features

• Save Session State Captures the current layout of windows, tabs and panes, along with their working directories and foreground processes.
• Restore Session Reopens a previously saved session that matches the current workspace name, restoring its layout and directories.
• Load Session Allows selecting which saved session to load, regardless of the current workspace name.
• Delete Session State Allows selecting which saved session to delete, regardless of the current workspace name.
• Edit Session State Allows selecting which saved session to edit, the json file is opened in the $EDITOR environment variable, or nvim if not set.

Edit a state can be useful if you find that the foreground processes of the session are not restored correctly.
In such cases you can manually set the tty string in the state file.

Installation

Add to your wezterm config

 local sessions = wezterm.plugin.require("https://github.com/abidibo/wezterm-sessions")
 sessions.apply_to_config(config) -- optional, this adds default keybindings

Configuration

1. Event Bindings: You can define your own keybindings:

   -- there are the default ones
   config.keys = {
       {
           key = 's',
           mods = 'ALT',
           action = act({ EmitEvent = "save_session" }),
       },
       {
           key = 'l',
           mods = 'ALT',
           action = act({ EmitEvent = "load_session" }),
       },
       {
           key = 'r',
           mods = 'ALT',
           action = act({ EmitEvent = "restore_session" }),
       },
       {
           key = 'd',
           mods = 'CTRL|SHIFT',
           action = act({ EmitEvent = "delete_session" }),
       },
       {
           key = 'e',
           mods = 'CTRL|SHIFT',
           action = act({ EmitEvent = "edit_session" }),
       },
   }

2. I also recommend to set up a keybinding for creating named workspaces or rename the current one:

   -- Rename current workspace
   {
       key = '$',
       mods = 'CTRL|SHIFT',
       action = act.PromptInputLine {
           description = 'Enter new workspace name',
           action = wezterm.action_callback(
               function(window, pane, line)
                   if line then
                       wezterm.mux.rename_workspace(wezterm.mux.get_active_workspace(), line)
                   end
               end
           ),
       },
   },
   -- Prompt for a name to use for a new workspace and switch to it.
   {
       key = 'w',
       mods = 'CTRL|SHIFT',
       action = act.PromptInputLine {
           description = wezterm.format {
               { Attribute = { Intensity = 'Bold' } },
               { Foreground = { AnsiColor = 'Fuchsia' } },
               { Text = 'Enter name for new workspace' },
           },
           action = wezterm.action_callback(function(window, pane, line)
               -- line will be `nil` if they hit escape without entering anything
               -- An empty string if they just hit enter
               -- Or the actual line of text they wrote
               if line then
                   window:perform_action(
                       act.SwitchToWorkspace {
                           name = line,
                       },
                       pane
                   )
               end
           end),
       },
   },
   ```
   

Events

The following events are emitted:

• wezter-sessions.save.start(file_path)
• wezter-sessions.save.end(file_path, res)
• wezter-sessions.load.start(workspace_name)
• wezter-sessions.load.end(workspace_name)
• wezter-sessions.restore.start(workspace_name)
• wezter-sessions.restore.end(workspace_name)
• wezter-sessions.delete.start(file_path)
• wezter-sessions.delete.end(file_path, res)
• wezter-sessions.edit.start(file_path, editor)

Limitations

There are currently some limitations and improvements that need to be implemented:

• The script is a fork of the original WezTerm Session Manager created by Daniel Copper, which had some limitations I tried to fix, but also it was tested both on linux and windows. On the contrary I'm only interested on linux and so new functionality won't be tested on windows (if windows users are willing to help, they're welcome).
• The script tries to restore the running processes (only on mac/linux) in each pane, and it does this by inspecting the proc cmdline file. Probably this can be improved and probably not all processes can be restored succesfully.
• The script does not treat remote sessions in a special way at the moment, and for what I read, there are some differences in WezTerm available infos for remote sessions. So maybe this doesn't work well in this scenario. It works well on local and unix domains.
• The script should be able to restore even complex workspaces layouts, but who knows :)

Credits

This project is now developed by abidibo.

It is a fork of the original WezTerm Session Manager created by Daniel Copper.

Contributing

Feedback, bug reports, and contributions to enhance the script are welcome.