What Opens When Electerm Starts: Default Tab, Bookmarks, or a Whole Workspace

Launch electerm and something is already there: a local terminal tab, sitting in your home directory, waiting. That is the out-of-the-box behaviour, and for a lot of people it is exactly right.

For everyone else it is a small daily annoyance. If you open electerm to reach four production hosts, a local shell you never use is one wasted tab and one extra keystroke, every time. If you open it to run one command locally, being greeted by nothing at all is worse.

All of that is configurable, and the three controls live in two places. The banner above is the whole decision in one loop: the default local tab, then nothing, then a saved workspace.

1. The three knobs

Setting	Where	Default	What it does
open default tab when app start	Settings → setting	on	When nothing else is configured, open a default tab at launch
open bookmarks on startup	Settings → setting	empty	Open a chosen set of bookmarks (or one workspace) at launch
start directory:local	Settings → terminal	empty	Starting path for the local side of SFTP panes

Two of those are on the same settings screen, one after the other: the open bookmarks on startup picker sits near the top, and the open default tab when app start toggle is further down in the general toggle list. In the config file they are onStartSessions and initDefaultTabOnStart.

2. The launch chain

The whole decision is one function, and it is short enough to read:

// src/client/store/load-data.js — openInitSessions()
const onStartSessions = store.config.onStartSessions

if (typeof onStartSessions === 'string' && onStartSessions) {
  store.loadWorkspace(onStartSessions)        // ① a workspace id
} else {
  const arr = Array.isArray(onStartSessions) ? onStartSessions : []
  for (const s of arr) {
    store.onSelectBookmark(s)                 // ② bookmark ids
  }
  if (!arr.length && store.config.initDefaultTabOnStart) {
    store.initFirstTab()                      // ③ the default tab
  }
}

Read top to bottom, that is the precedence order:

1. A workspace was chosen → load it. Layout, panes and sessions come back exactly as saved. The default tab is not opened.
2. Bookmarks were chosen → open each one. The default tab is not opened.
3. Nothing was chosen → open the default tab, but only if initDefaultTabOnStart is on.
4. Nothing was chosen and the toggle is off → open nothing. The window shows the empty state.

Note what is missing: there is no "and also" anywhere. These are alternatives, not layers. Choosing bookmarks suppresses the default tab; choosing a workspace suppresses both.

3. Turning the default local terminal off

This is the one people come looking for. In Settings → setting, find open default tab when app start and switch it off.

What you get at launch is an empty window with the "no session" panel: a row of buttons at the top (new tab, new bookmark, and create bookmark by AI if AI is configured), the electerm logo, and your connection history below it. Nothing is connected, nothing is consuming a shell, and the first thing you click is the thing you actually wanted.

Two things worth knowing about that toggle:

• It only governs the default tab. If you have bookmarks or a workspace configured for startup, the toggle is irrelevant — the code never reaches it.
• It is a per-machine setting stored in your config, so it syncs with your settings if you use data sync.

4. Opening bookmarks at launch

Back in Settings → setting, the section headed open bookmarks on startup has its own two tabs: bookmarks and Workspaces.

The bookmarks tab is a tree-select over your bookmark tree, and it is checkable — so you can tick individual bookmarks, or tick a whole group and get everything under it. The value stored is a flat array of bookmark ids, and selecting a group stores its children rather than the group itself:

// src/client/components/setting-panel/start-session-select.jsx
treeCheckable: true,
showCheckedStrategy: SHOW_CHILD

SHOW_CHILD is why the picker shows the leaves. Practically: reorder or rename the group later and the startup list keeps working, because it points at the bookmarks.

This is the setting the video walkthrough below covers, and it is the right one when your startup set is a few independent sessions rather than a fixed arrangement. If you care about which pane each session lands in, you want a workspace instead.

5. Opening a workspace at launch

Same section, switch to the Workspaces tab, pick one from the dropdown. That is the whole configuration.

The two tabs are mutually exclusive by design. The stored value has two possible shapes — an array of bookmark ids, or a single workspace id string — and switching tabs clears the other one, because the launch chain above can only follow one branch:

// src/client/components/setting-panel/start-session-select.jsx
if (key === 'bookmarks' && typeof onStartSessions === 'string') {
  onChangeStartSessions([])
} else if (key === 'workspaces' && Array.isArray(onStartSessions)) {
  onChangeStartSessions(undefined)
}

If the Workspaces tab is empty, you have not saved a workspace yet — that is done from the layout dropdown in the tab bar, not from Settings. See Workspaces in Electerm.

6. "Default tab" is not always one tab

A detail that surprises people who use a split layout: the default tab is created once per pane.

// src/client/store/tab.js — initFirstTab()
const { layout } = store
const batchCount = splitConfig[layout].children || 1
for (let i = 0; i < batchCount; i++) {
  const newTab = newTerm()
  newTab.batch = i
  store.addTab(newTab)
}

So if you last used a 2x2 grid, launching electerm with the default tab on gives you four local terminals, one per pane — not one. splitConfig gives the count per layout:

Layout	Panes
c1 single	1
c2 two columns	2
c3 three columns	3
r2 two rows	2
r3 three rows	3
c2x2 grid	4
c1r2 two rows right	3
r1c2 two columns bottom	3

If four local shells at launch is not what you want, that is another reason to configure explicit startup sessions — or to use c1 and let the layout restore later.

7. Where the local terminal actually starts

The local shell does not start in a directory you configure; it starts in your home directory, because that is what the process is spawned with:

// src/app/server/session-local.js
const cwd = process.env[platform === 'win32' ? 'USERPROFILE' : 'HOME']

To make it open somewhere else, electerm types a cd into the shell as the first startup script. Three things can supply that path, in this order:

// src/client/components/terminal/startup-queue.js
const startFolder = reloadCwd || startDirectory || window.initFolder

Source	Set by
reloadCwd	The restored cwd, only when restore terminal session on reload is on
startDirectory	The bookmark's own start directory:remote field
window.initFolder	The -d / --init-folder command-line flag

So the command-line flag is the one that changes where the default local terminal opens:

electerm -d ~/code/my-project

Two caveats on that flag, both visible in the code:

• It is skipped when startup sessions are configured. The flag is only adopted when nothing is set to open at launch and the default tab is enabled:

  // src/client/store/load-data.js
  } else if (
    options.initFolder &&
    !(store.config.onStartSessions || []).length &&
    store.config.initDefaultTabOnStart
  ) {
    window.initFolder = options.initFolder
  }
  

  Configure bookmarks or a workspace at startup and -d silently stops applying to the default tab.

• It is deliberately not local-only. -d was added as "ssh/local terminal init folder", and it shows: window.initFolder is a process-wide value and the startup queue does not check whether the tab is local before using it, so the same cd is queued for any tab that has no start directory of its own — SSH tabs included. It is a cd, so a path that does not exist remotely fails harmlessly and the shell carries on. Because the value is never cleared, later tabs opened without a start directory of their own inherit it too.

The separate start directory:local setting is a different value (startDirectoryLocal). It is read as the starting path for the local half of an SFTP pane — tab.startDirectoryLocal || config.startDirectoryLocal — and it is also what the -d flag writes into a session opened from the command line. It is not consulted when the local terminal picks its cd.

8. Three things that will bite you

A configured startup list beats everything, silently. Set bookmarks or a workspace at startup and both the default tab and -d stop doing anything. If launching electerm no longer opens your local shell, check that picker before anything else.

A workspace with a deleted bookmark opens a gap. Startup runs the same loadWorkspace as the manual path, including its if (!item) return guard — a workspace entry pointing at a bookmark that no longer exists opens nothing and says nothing.

onStartSessions is not one type. An array means bookmarks, a string means a workspace. This is why the picker's two tabs clear each other, and why hand-editing the config to onStartSessions: ["my-workspace"] produces a startup with no tabs at all rather than a workspace.

Where next

• Workspaces in Electerm — what the workspace branch of the launch chain actually restores.
• Electerm Session Layout — the eight layouts, and why the default tab multiplies.
• Custom data folder — where these settings live on disk.
• Data sync — how startup settings travel between machines.