Project tabs

On this page

Behind the scenes: the design note docs/design/project-tabs.md argues the why — it is a contributor document and is not part of this site.

The split grid is one workspace. Project tabs give you several. Each tab is a whole workspace — its own split grid of panes and its own minimize dock — and switching tabs swaps the entire workspace in and out, so you can keep several projects side by side without their panes competing for screen space.

Like every orrerix panel, tabs never resize the terminal underneath: a background tab is hidden, not torn down, so its PTYs keep running and switching never repaints a terminal (the same no-resize promise as maximize).

Open, switch, close

  • New tab — Ctrl+Shift+T, or the + at the end of the tab strip. It opens on the welcome / pane-setup screen where you pick the pane’s kind (Agent, Orchestrator, or Terminal) — never a blank tab.
  • Switch — click a tab, or page with Ctrl+Shift+[ (previous) and Ctrl+Shift+] (next).
  • Reorder — drag a tab to a new spot in the strip; drop it to the left or right half of another tab to land it there. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+[ / Ctrl+Alt+Shift+] move the active tab one slot left/right without a mouse. The new order is saved with everything else a tab carries — it survives a restart.
  • Close — Ctrl+Shift+K, or the tab’s ✕. There’s always at least one tab; closing the last one is refused.

Closing a tab that runs an orchestration project (it owns live agents) asks for a two-step confirm first — the ✕ turns into ✕?; click again to end the project’s agents. Plain terminal tabs close immediately.

Background tabs keep running

An inactive tab is hidden with display:none, not detached — its terminals keep streaming and its scroll history stays intact, so switching back is instant and lossless. Agents in a background tab run untouched; their PTYs are owned by the backend, independent of which tab is on screen.

Name & color

  • Rename — double-click a tab’s name and type (Enter commits, Esc cancels), the same inline edit as pane rename.
  • Color — click the small dot on a tab to pick an accent: one of the shared group colors, a custom color, or default. The accent marks the tab so projects are easy to tell apart at a glance.

Orchestration lands in its own tab

Launch an orchestrator (welcome screen → Orchestrator + workers) and it opens a new project tab named for the repo, rather than taking over the tab you’re on. Its workers spawn into that tab as the backend requests them — even while you’re looking at another project.

  • A worker that blocks on you (a permission prompt, a question) in a hidden tab raises an unmistakable ⚠ blocked / ⚠ waiting chip on that tab’s strip entry — the same label the pane header shows — so a background project can’t hide its ask. Click the tab to jump straight to the pane.
  • The tab shows a live ✦agents · $cost chip. The agent count is exact — it counts the agent panes actually open in that tab (normal agents and live orchestration panes); the cost comes from the group.
  • A tab running orchestration shows a ⛓ marker; a tab holding a dormant (restored-but-not-resumed) group shows a static ORCH chip. A tab can mix normal agents and orchestration, so these are independent of the agent count.
  • When the orchestrator focuses an agent (or you restore its session), orrerix switches to that agent’s tab first, then focuses the pane.

See the orchestration guide for the group workflow itself.

Live preview

Hover a background tab to get a live thumbnail that composites the tab’s whole layout — every pane, arranged like its split, with terminal colors and spacing intact — refreshed a few times a second so a running prompt streams in as you watch.

The preview is a text snapshot of each pane’s in-memory buffer, never a live terminal — so it costs no PTY resize and honors the no-resize rule. All mini-panes render at one consistent, readable text size; a very large pane crops to its cell rather than shrinking illegibly. Big grids are capped (extra panes show a small placeholder); docked panes aren’t shown.

Pause a project

Right-click a tab and choose Pause project to hold prompt / kickoff delivery to that project’s agents, so they idle out and stop spending while you’re away; Resume project re-enables delivery. A paused tab shows a ⏸. Deliveries that arrive while you’re paused are held rather than dropped, and are delivered when you resume — see the orchestration guide, which describes the group pause this is the per-tab form of, including what happens to a very long pause.

Restore your session on launch

Reopen orrerix with a saved session and it asks first: a “Restore your last session?” splash with Restore and Start fresh. Tick Remember my choice and future launches skip the splash and do what you picked; leave it unticked to be asked again next launch. Pressing Esc is a non-committal Start fresh — it never remembers and leaves your saved session on disk, so the splash comes back next launch (a stray Escape can’t quietly wipe your session). There’s no prompt when there’s nothing worth restoring — you go straight to a fresh welcome tab.

Restore brings back every tab — names, colors, order, the active tab, its group binding — and each tab’s full pane layout, split for split, with the divider positions you’d dragged. Each pane comes back by kind:

  • Terminals re-spawn a fresh shell in their recorded folder and shell kind (PowerShell / cmd / Git Bash) — instant, nothing to resume.
  • Agent panes (Claude) auto-resume their session — the CLI reopens with its prior context loaded, into the idle TUI. Resuming spends nothing until you send a prompt, and orrerix never replays one for you. If the recorded session has no saved conversation (you closed it before sending a prompt, or the transcript was deleted), the pane comes back as a fresh session in the same spot — same folder, same agent — instead of erroring; a best-effort CLI with no resumable session at all comes back as a dormant pane with a Start button. That card is styled as a clear error state — a red accent, a warning icon, and a heading that says so — not just another neutral dormant card, since “nothing to resume” is worth noticing rather than looking identical to a group that’s simply waiting for a click; the explanation of what happened stays visible underneath, and Start is still the prominent next action.
  • SSH panes come back dormant, with a Reconnect button. Nothing dials out until you click it: the agent CLI at the far end runs on someone else’s machine and spends their credits, and a host that’s asleep or behind a VPN would otherwise stall startup on a connection that can take a minute to fail. Reconnect rebuilds the connection from the saved profile, so a connection you’ve edited since (a new port, a different remote folder) reconnects with the edit — and if you deleted the saved connection, the card says so rather than guessing at one. With Claude Code on the far end the reconnect resumes the remote session it recorded; other CLIs come back on a new conversation, because only Claude’s session id travels on the command line where orrerix can put it. The same Reconnect offer appears if a live connection drops mid-session — the pane stays open with the output that explains why (a timeout, a closed connection, a refused key) and the offer floats over it, so you read the reason before deciding. Ending the session yourself (exit on the far end) closes the pane as usual.
  • Orchestration panes come back dormant, with a Resume group button — reviving a whole group can spawn workers and spend credits, so that stays a deliberate, human-triggered action. The tab keeps its group binding and shows the ORCH marker until you resume. Resume group is one-click consent for the whole group: the orchestrator relaunches (task board, MCP identity), and then every worker/reviewer that had an active session rejoins the group and resumes into its idle TUI — re-registered so the orchestrator can message it, and spending nothing until it’s given work. An idle agent that never started a conversation isn’t restored (there’s nothing to resume); the orchestrator can respawn one on demand. Clicking Resume group is acknowledged immediately — the button disables and spins right away, before the relaunch (session lookup, MCP config, PTY spawn, CLI boot) finishes — so there’s no dead-feeling pause where nothing on screen tells you the click landed. If the group’s orchestrator session turns out not to be resumable, the card switches to the same error styling as the agent case above (with the specific reason) instead of quietly reverting to looking like an untouched “Resume group” card; a toast covers the in-the-moment notice, and the card itself is what’s still there if you come back to the tab later.
  • A tab holding two orchestration groups (split an orchestrator tab and launch a second orchestrator into it, or restore a group into a tab that already has one) restores both, separately: each group gets its own Resume group card, and each card brings back that group’s own orchestrator and its own workers. Resuming one leaves the other’s card exactly where it was, so a group you haven’t resumed yet is never mistaken for one that’s gone. A worker is only ever rejoined into the group its own recorded session belongs to — if something asks for it under a different group, the restore fails with a message instead of attaching it to the wrong orchestrator. (An older saved tab may not record which group each pane belonged to; if such a tab holds two orchestrators, the card says so and points you at the session browser, where each session’s group is known, rather than guessing at one.)

Start fresh opens a single blank welcome tab and leaves the rest behind.

Everything is saved to durable app storage (not the browser’s), so clearing webview data doesn’t lose it. What is never captured is the live terminal buffer/scrollback or the process itself — a pane is re-created or resumed from its record, so its on-screen history from last session is gone (the process died with the app). See the design note.

Orrerix is MIT-licensed. This site documents what ships on main; the source of truth is the code.

This site uses Just the Docs, a documentation theme for Jekyll.