Term — SSH sessions that come back

Why SSH needs the help

A phone is not a server. HarmonyOS suspends an app that stays in the background too long, and ends it outright under memory pressure — and the moment the process is frozen or gone, the TCP connection underneath an SSH session goes with it.

Mosh takes that in its stride, because a mosh session is something you can re-enter: the server half is still running and still holding your shell. SSH has nothing of the kind. A dropped SSH connection is simply gone — there is no session waiting on the far side, only a shell that got a hangup. So Term does not pretend to resume an SSH session. It reconnects, and lets a terminal multiplexer on the host hand your work back.

Which is why this is not a switch you can flip on its own: tmux or zellij is the part that actually kept your work running, and Term is the part that gets you back to it.

Switching it on

It is set per host and off by default, and the toggle only appears once that host can actually make use of it.

Open Edit host and expand Advanced options.
Set a Startup script that attaches a multiplexer — tmux new -A -s main is the usual choice.
An Auto-resume sessions toggle appears directly below the script field. Turn it on and save.

The advanced options of the host editor. The startup script is “System info”, and the section goes straight from the jump host to Tags — there is no auto-resume row. — **A script that attaches nothing** — the Auto-resume sessions row is not there at all.

The same section with the startup script set to “attach tmux”. Below the jump host there is now an Auto-resume sessions toggle with an explanation under it. — **A script that attaches tmux** — the toggle appears directly under it, off until you turn it on. The text below it is the whole promise: tabs killed with the app come back next launch, tabs dropped in the background reconnect when you return.

No qualifying script, no toggle. A script that only prints the system info — or no script at all — leaves nothing to come back to, so the row stays hidden rather than promising something it cannot deliver. It is SSH-only for the same reason: a mosh host already resumes the session itself, and telnet has no equivalent to offer.

Startup scripts that qualify

# tmux — create the session, or attach if it already exists
tmux new -A -s main

# zellij
zellij attach -c main

After the app is killed

Force-closed, swiped out of recents, or crashed with auto-resume tabs open: the next launch opens them again. A small overlay counts them off while it works and closes itself when it is done — the same one mosh sessions use, because it is the same launch.

A small overlay over the host list reading “Resuming 1 session…” with a 0 / 1 counter underneath. — **At launch** — one tab to bring back. The list behind it stays visible, and the overlay closes on its own.

The pair below is that, on a real phone. The session had RESUME-MARKER-7317 on screen; the app was force-closed, and opened again two minutes later.

A tmux session titled “tmux new -A -s term”, with echo RESUME-MARKER-7317 and its output on screen. Status bar time 10:31. — **Before** — a tmux session with `RESUME-MARKER-7317` printed. The app was force-closed straight after this.

The same tab after a fresh launch of the app: the same two lines, the same prompt. Status bar time 10:33. — **After** — a new launch two minutes later. The tab reconnected on its own, the startup script re-attached the same tmux session, and the scrollback above the prompt is the scrollback. Nothing was re-run.

Coming back from the background

The other half is quieter, and you are meant not to notice it. Leave Term in the background long enough for the connection to die and the tab is dropped; switch back to the app and it reconnects by itself, usually within a couple of seconds.

It stays out of the way while it does: no focus taken from the tab you are looking at, and no retry loop — one attempt, then a cooldown. The manual Reconnect button is unchanged and still covers everything else, including hosts that never opted in.

Worth knowing

Logging out is respected

This only ever answers a connection that was taken from you. Run exit, or close the tab yourself, and the tab closes and stays closed — the next launch has nothing to bring back.

It restores the connection, not the terminal

Term reconnects and runs your startup script; everything you get back after that comes from tmux or zellij on the host. Point the script at a fixed session name — that is what the -A in tmux new -A -s main is for — so the second connection attaches to the first session instead of starting a new one beside it.

GNU screen does not qualify

A screen startup script deliberately does not bring the toggle up. screen mishandles what modern full-screen programs draw — truecolor, italics, busy TUI redraws all degrade — so the session it hands back often looks broken, and that reads as a failed resume rather than a screen limitation. Use tmux or zellij instead.

A mosh host does not need this

Mosh resumes the session itself — same shell, same running program, no multiplexer required — so the toggle is hidden on the mosh transport. If the server can run mosh-server, that is still the better answer; this is for the hosts where it cannot.