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Damn it My Computer needs to Restart, BUT I have 10 TABS OPEN

Just here for the code?the gist →

I hate restarting my computer.

But sometimes it’s inevitable. Here’s what I did to make this terror a little bit more palatable.

This morning was one of those times. macOS wanted a restart, and I had about 10 iTerm2 tabs open — most of them Claude Code sessions I’d been running for hours (Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal coding agent). A restart wipes all of it, and I didn’t want “roughly the same terminals” back. I wanted the EXACT same tabs, in the same order, each one resumed on the same conversation.

So I built a small tool to do it. Here’s the idea it’s built on.

The tab is not the work

A terminal tab feels like the thing you’d lose. It isn’t. The work is the Claude Code conversation, and that conversation is written to disk as it happens — every session lives at ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<uuid>.jsonl. That file is there whether the tab is open or not. Close the tab, quit the whole terminal, reboot the machine: the transcript stays. The one command that brings it back is claude --resume <uuid>.

So “save my tabs” really means: for each tab, find its transcript UUID and its working directory, and write down cd <cwd> && claude --resume <uuid>. Do that in tab order and you can rebuild the exact window.

The tools

Three scripts and a LaunchAgent. They’re macOS + iTerm2 specific — the tab ordering comes from AppleScript — so this won’t work on another terminal, or on Linux or Windows. You also need Claude Code and Python 3. tmux is optional.

save-tabs writes ~/.claude/session-backups/RESTORE.md (plus a JSON version). It walks every iTerm2 tab in order and, for each, writes its claude --resume command. It also records the last-activity time and the last message on that tab — the assistant’s last line and my last prompt — so the doc reads like something a human can scan, not just a list of UUIDs.

restore-tabs reopens each session in a new iTerm2 tab, in the original order. It won’t double-resume: if a session is already live in another tab, it skips it, because two Claude processes writing one transcript step on each other. It names each tab and confirms claude actually launched before moving on.

reboot-nudge is sourced from ~/.zshrc. On the first shell after a reboot, if tabs were open beforehand, it prints a one-line reminder. Otherwise it stays quiet.

And the safety net: a LaunchAgent runs save-tabs every 15 minutes, so an unplanned reboot still has a recent doc. It never overwrites a good doc with an empty run.

Get it

It’s all in the gist. The README has the exact behavior for each script. Requirements, so nobody’s surprised: macOS, iTerm2, Claude Code, Python 3, tmux optional.

Now when macOS nags me to restart, I run one command, hit restart, and run one more when it’s back. Same ten tabs, same conversations, same order.