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Comment by mmagin | Hacker News Reader

Dare I ask how having half a million terminals open in screen is useful in any way?

Ok, not really half a million. Maybe 20 or so :) That's still a lot of state to lose for a kernel-upgrade reboot.

I guess it's a style of working. If you need to ask, that probably means you're not the kind of person who cares about the advanced tab-grouping features in firefox either, and you probably also never have so many different paper files open on your desk that you can't find space for your laptop? I'm not sure I can explain, and certainly not defend it - you might call it "organised chaos" :)

In any case, it's all state, and it doesn't all fit in your head. And a reboot wipes it out!

Not necessarily, for example firefox always restores the previous state – but I for example tend to always clean everything after I finished one project, completely clean the room IRL and my folders on my system, and then start with an empty space again for the next project. Keeps the chaos manageable xD

Wow, you can say that a project is finished with, requires no maintenance and no bug fixing?

I wish I was that perfect! :)

I usually have at least a dozen separate projects going at any time, and many of them have run for years.

I couldn't imagine being able to clean up stuff like that.

Do you know of any decent way to save the layout / history of each term window? Or more generally, the state of X desktop, to be able to reload later / have several "workspaces" set up for different sets of tasks?

If you use tmux, there's tmuxinator that uses a YAML file to describe the initial setup for a tmux session.

There is also Tmux resurrect that you might take a look: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect

+1 for Tmux Resurrect. Pretty convenient.

The Mac OS X terminal also saves and restores the window position, working directory, and scroll back of each terminal.

Session management has been a part of X desktops for a long time, but a few years back it was hidden from the primary UI and some (many?) apps stopped supporting it. You can still find the options buried somewhere in the system settings for KDE/GNOME/etc. Unfortunately it doesn't save your ssh sessions, but you can use preset tab sets for konsole to help with that.

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