Sessions and tabs¶

A connection is a saved definition — a host, a port, credentials, an environment and an AI setting. A session is one open instance of it. This page is about the open ones: how they stack up as tabs, what happens when one drops, and how to move one out of the main window.

Session tabs¶

Double-clicking a connection opens a session in a tab on the strip along the top of the window. You can run many at once, across different hosts and different connection types, and switch between them either by clicking a tab or by using the session dropdown in the terminal header — the control labelled with the current session name, which lists every open session.

Right-clicking a tab gives you the per-session actions: pin the tab, detach it, take it fullscreen, save or print its output, change the font size, disconnect or reconnect, copy the hostname, and the various close-other-tabs operations. Each has a shortcut shown beside it in the menu; Keyboard shortcuts collects them.

The terminal header also carries a Broadcast: send to all sessions toggle, which sends what you type to every open session rather than just the active one. Read the tab strip before you turn it on.

Auto-reconnect¶

Auto-reconnect re-establishes a session whose connection dropped. It is on by default, and the status bar shows its state as Auto: ON or Auto: OFF — click it to toggle.

When an SSH session that had successfully connected at least once drops, the terminal prints a countdown and reconnects when it reaches zero. Pressing any key during the countdown cancels it, after which you can reconnect by hand with Enter or Ctrl+R. A session that never connected in the first place does not get a countdown; it tells you how to retry instead.

Auto-reconnect applies to SSH

Telnet, RSH and serial sessions print the disconnect and wait for you to reconnect them.

Detached windows¶

A session can be detached into a window of its own — click the Float terminal (detach) button in the terminal header, or choose Detach tab from the tab's context menu. This is how you get a terminal onto a second monitor while the AI panel stays on the first. The tab stays in the strip with a marker showing it lives elsewhere, and clicking it brings the detached window to the front. Redocking returns the session, and its scrollback, to the main window.

A detached window is a live terminal view of a session that is already connected. The features that act across the workbench stay in the main window: broadcast mode, the idle lock, the working-directory sync with the file explorer, the analysis context menu, and saving or printing terminal output. Redock the session to use any of them.

Working across many hosts¶

The session tab strip, the per-connection AI toggles and per-group policy are designed to work together. A realistic production setup looks like this:

A Production group with a strict Command Safety profile and a Data Handling profile that also scrubs hostnames and IP addresses.
A Staging group with a moderate profile.
A Lab group with a permissive profile and minimal redaction.

The same assistant behaves differently in each, without you changing a setting when you switch tabs. Both profiles resolve from the connection, then its group, then the Default profile. Auto-run is not part of either profile — it is one switch for the workstation — see Data Handling profiles and Organising connections.

Per-session AI context¶

Each session keeps its own AI conversation. The transcript in the AI panel belongs to the session tab it was opened in and lasts as long as that tab does; switching tabs switches the transcript rather than merging them. The provider choice is per session too, so you can point a lab session at a small local model and a production session at a larger one. New AI session clears the conversation for the current session only.

Sessions are kept separate. To have the assistant reason across two hosts, say so and attach what it needs; OpsPilot does not pool the scrollback of unrelated sessions into one context.

A connection whose AI badge is off contributes nothing at all — no scrollback, no files, no presence. That control is per connection.