Workspaces

A workspace is a saved snapshot of an open layout — your tabs, your split panes, which connection lives in each pane, and how they are arranged — that you can reopen later with a single click. Instead of reconnecting to your five production boxes and re-splitting them into the grid you like every morning, you save that arrangement once as a workspace and launch it whenever you need it.

Think of it like a saved browser session: close everything at the end of the day, and tomorrow “Production stack” brings the whole set back exactly as you left it.

Workspaces are a desktop feature.

What a workspace captures

A workspace stores, for each tab in the group:

• the tab name (any custom label you gave it),
• the tab color (the colored chip you picked),
• the full pane layout — every split, the split ratios, which pane was active, and whether each pane is a terminal or an SFTP pane, and
• the connection behind each pane (stored as the saved connection, not the live session).

Because it stores connections rather than live sessions, launching a workspace always starts fresh sessions. That means a workspace deliberately does not restore:

• scrollback or terminal history,
• running processes or shell state,
• anything typed but not saved.

You get the same arrangement of the same servers, freshly connected — not a frozen snapshot of a running session.

Saving a workspace

Workspaces are saved from a tab that is a group (a tab holding more than one pane / connection):

1. Right-click the tab you want to save.
2. Choose “Save Group as Workspace…”.
3. Give it a name (e.g. “Production stack”, “Deploy prep”) and confirm.

Every pane in that tab must map to a saved connection. If the tab contains an ad-hoc / one-off session that was never saved as a connection, ZestSSH cannot capture it and the save is refused with a message — save the connection first, then save the workspace.

Launching a workspace

Open the Workspaces picker from the container switcher (the tree / workspace menu). The picker lists each saved workspace as a preview card showing:

• the workspace name,
• how many tabs and panes it contains,
• each tab, with its sessions listed underneath using the connection’s real label, and
• an SFTP tag on any pane that opens an SFTP view.

Click a card to launch it. ZestSSH starts a session for every connection in the snapshot and rebuilds the tabs and splits to match — same layout, same ratios, same tab names and colors.

If a connection was deleted since the workspace was saved, that pane is skipped and shown as “(deleted connection)” in the preview. If every connection in a workspace is gone, the launch fails with a “connections may have been deleted” message.

To remove a workspace, use the trash icon on its card in the picker.

Using workspaces in ZestSSH

1. Connect the servers you want and arrange them into a tab — split it into the grid you like (see Split Terminal).
2. Right-click the tab and choose Save Group as Workspace…; name it.
3. Later, open the Workspaces picker and click the workspace to relaunch the whole layout.
4. Delete workspaces you no longer need from the picker.

Where workspaces are stored

Workspaces are saved locally on the device. They persist across app restarts, but they live with that installation — they are a convenience layout store, not part of your synced connection data.

Workspaces are one of ZestSSH’s desktop “containers” for organizing your work; keep them distinct from Trees and Crates, which group connections rather than saving a live layout.

Common mistakes

• Expecting running processes or scrollback to come back. A workspace restores the layout and the connections, then opens fresh sessions. A tail -f you had running, or your command history in that pane, will not return.
• Trying to save a tab with ad-hoc sessions. Only panes backed by a saved connection can be captured. Quick-connect one-offs must be saved as connections first.
• Forgetting a workspace references connections by identity. If you delete or heavily edit a connection later, the corresponding pane is skipped (or reflects the edited connection) on the next launch.
• Launching a large workspace on the free tier. A workspace opens one session per pane, and concurrent sessions are capped on the free tier — a big layout may not open every pane until you upgrade.

Free tier vs Pro

	Free	Pro (Squeezed)
Save and launch workspaces	Yes	Yes
Concurrent sessions a workspace can open	Up to 4 on desktop / 2 on mobile	Unlimited
SFTP panes inside a workspace	Requires Pro (SFTP is a Pro feature)	Yes

A workspace with more panes than your session cap will only open as many as the cap allows — large multi-server layouts are where Pro’s unlimited sessions matter.

Next steps

• Split Terminal — build the pane layout you will save as a workspace.
• Broadcast — once a workspace’s servers are open, drive them all at once.
• Server Monitor — keep an eye on the fleet a workspace opens.
• SSH Connections — the saved connections a workspace re-launches.