Workspaces in Electerm: Save a Layout and Its Sessions, Restore Them in One Click

Every morning the same ritual: open electerm, switch to a 2x2 layout, then open web-01, web-02, db-01 and cache-01 into the four panes in the right order. Nothing about that is interesting, and nothing about it is hard — it is just four clicks and a layout switch you have now performed several hundred times.

A workspace is electerm's answer to that: a named preset that holds both the layout and the set of connections that were open inside it. Click it and the window becomes that arrangement again.

The banner above is the whole feature in one loop: build a 2x2 grid, save it as prod-web from the layout dropdown, then click prod-web and watch the grid come back.

1. What a workspace actually stores

Saving a workspace does not snapshot your terminal scrollback or your shell state. It records exactly two things — the layout, and which bookmark sits in which pane:

// src/client/store/workspace.js
getCurrentWorkspaceState () {
  const { layout, tabs } = store
  const tabsByBatch = {}
  for (const tab of tabs) {
    const batch = tab.batch || 0
    if (!tabsByBatch[batch]) tabsByBatch[batch] = []
    if (tab.srcId) {
      tabsByBatch[batch].push({
        srcId: tab.srcId,
        sshSftpSplitView: tab.sshSftpSplitView
      })
    }
  }
  return { layout, tabsByBatch }
}

So a saved workspace is a small object:

{
  "id": "wk1a2b3c",
  "name": "prod-web",
  "layout": "c2x2",
  "tabsByBatch": {
    "0": [{ "srcId": "bm-web01", "sshSftpSplitView": false }],
    "1": [{ "srcId": "bm-web02", "sshSftpSplitView": false }],
    "2": [{ "srcId": "bm-db01", "sshSftpSplitView": true }],
    "3": [{ "srcId": "bm-cache01", "sshSftpSplitView": false }]
  },
  "createdAt": 1759363200000,
  "updatedAt": 1759363200000
}

Three details worth internalising:

• layout is one of the eight layout keys — c1 (single), c2, c3 (columns), r2, r3 (rows), c2x2 (grid), c1r2 (two rows right) and r1c2 (two columns bottom). The same keys the layout menu uses.
• tabsByBatch is keyed by the pane index (tab.batch), and the value is a list — so one pane can hold several stacked tabs, and the workspace remembers which one was in front.
• sshSftpSplitView is stored per tab, so a pane you had split into terminal + SFTP comes back split. This was added later than the feature itself (#4418, v3.15.120) — an older workspace simply has the field missing, which reads as "not split".

2. What does not get saved

That if (tab.srcId) guard is the whole story: only tabs opened from a bookmark are captured.

Tab opened from	Saved?
A bookmark in the sidebar	Yes — by bookmark id
Quick connect	No
A local terminal / "new tab"	No
A web, VNC, RDP, Spice or serial tab	No
An SFTP tab	Only as the split-view half of a bookmark tab

The reason is that a workspace stores a reference, not a connection. Bookmark ids are stable, so restoring is "open bookmark X in pane 2". A quick-connect session has no id to point at, so there is nothing to restore.

The practical consequence: if your daily setup includes a local shell, put that local shell in a bookmark too (a bookmark with no host is a perfectly valid local-terminal bookmark), and it will be part of the workspace like anything else.

3. Saving

The entry point is not in Settings — it is the layout dropdown in the tab bar, on the right-hand side. It is the icon that shows your current layout with a caret next to it, so a 2x2 layout shows a 2x2 grid glyph.

1. Set the layout you want (same dropdown, layout tab).
2. Open the bookmarks you want, in the panes you want them in.
3. Reopen the dropdown and switch to the Workspaces tab.
4. Press save — the full-width button at the top of the list.
5. In the dialog, choose Save as new and give it a name, or overwrite and pick an existing workspace from the dropdown.

Save as new always creates a fresh entry with a new id. overwrite keeps the target's id and its name — the name field is ignored on that path, because the code passes the existing name through:

// src/client/components/tabs/workspace-save-modal.jsx
const ws = workspaces.find(w => w.id === selectedId)
window.store.saveWorkspace(ws?.name || name, selectedId)

Both paths stamp updatedAt, so an overwritten workspace does not silently reorder into "newest first" — the list order is whatever the store's collection order is, and new entries are appended.

4. Loading

Click a workspace in the list. That is it — there is no confirmation dialog, and no undo.

Under the hood, loadWorkspace() does four things in order:

// src/client/store/workspace.js — loadWorkspace()
store.removeTabs(() => true)          // 1. close every open tab
store.setLayout(layout)               // 2. switch the split layout
for (const [batchStr, tabInfos] of Object.entries(tabsByBatch)) {
  const batch = parseInt(batchStr, 10)
  for (const tabInfo of tabInfos) {
    if (tabInfo.srcId) {
      window.openTabBatch = batch    // 3. target this pane
      store.onSelectBookmark(tabInfo.srcId)
      if (tabInfo.sshSftpSplitView !== undefined) {
        store.updateTab(store.activeTabId, {   // 4. restore the split view
          sshSftpSplitView: tabInfo.sshSftpSplitView
        })
      }
    }
  }
}

window.openTabBatch is the mechanism that routes a new tab into a specific pane: addTab reads it (batch: window.openTabBatch ?? store.currentLayoutBatch) and then clears it. That is also how the little + button on each pane knows which pane it belongs to.

Two behaviours follow from step 1, and both surprise people once:

• Loading is destructive. Everything currently open closes first — including tabs that were never part of any workspace. If you were three commands into something, save it elsewhere before clicking a workspace.
• A workspace is a preset, not a snapshot. Loading it always produces the same thing, regardless of what you had open. It does not merge.

5. Deleting

Hover a workspace row and a delete icon fades in on the right. Click it, confirm the delete? popconfirm, and the entry is gone (deleteWorkspace → delItem). Deleting a workspace never touches the bookmarks it references — it removes the preset, nothing else.

6. Making a workspace the thing electerm opens

This is where workspaces pay for themselves. In Settings → common, near the top, there is a section headed open bookmarks on startup with two tabs of its own:

• bookmarks — a tree-select where you tick bookmarks (and groups) to open at launch.
• Workspaces — a single-select of your saved workspaces.

Pick a workspace there and electerm loads it at startup: same layout, same panes, same sessions, before you have touched the mouse. Under the hood the setting is one value with two shapes — an array of bookmark ids, or a string workspace id — and the startup code branches on the type:

// src/client/store/load-data.js — openInitSessions()
const onStartSessions = store.config.onStartSessions
if (typeof onStartSessions === 'string' && onStartSessions) {
  store.loadWorkspace(onStartSessions)   // a workspace id
} else {
  const arr = Array.isArray(onStartSessions) ? onStartSessions : []
  for (const s of arr) store.onSelectBookmark(s)   // bookmark ids
  if (!arr.length && store.config.initDefaultTabOnStart) store.initFirstTab()
}

The two tabs in the picker are mutually exclusive for exactly this reason — switching tabs clears the other value. There is a separate post on that whole startup chain: What Opens When Electerm Starts.

7. Where workspaces live, and how they travel

Workspaces are a normal collection in electerm's local database (settingMap.workspaces), sitting next to bookmarks and themes. That means:

• They are included in data sync — webdav-sync.js syncs workspaces.json and workspaces.order.json alongside your bookmarks, so a workspace saved on the laptop shows up on the desktop.
• They are included in import/export, and in the sync-comparison dialog, which lists workspaces as its own row.
• They survive a reinstall if you keep your data folder — see Moving Electerm's Data Folder.

8. Three things that will bite you

A deleted bookmark leaves a silent hole. onSelectBookmark starts with if (!item) return — a workspace entry pointing at a bookmark that no longer exists opens nothing, with no warning. The pane just stays empty. If a workspace comes back one pane short, check whether that bookmark still exists.

Overwriting does not rename. As above, overwrite reuses the stored name. If you want the same arrangement under a new name, use Save as new.

A workspace only covers bookmark tabs. It is not a session-restore feature. If you want the terminal state (scrollback, current directory) back after a reload, that is the separate restoreTerminalSessionOnReload setting, and it works on the tab you had, not on a saved arrangement.

Where next

• What Opens When Electerm Starts — the startup chain a workspace plugs into.
• Terminal and SFTP Split View — the per-pane split state a workspace also stores.
• Bookmarks, Quickly — since every workspace entry points at one.
• Electerm data sync — how workspaces move between machines.

The upstream wiki page for this feature is Workspace Feature. One caveat if you read it: its "Managing Workspaces in Settings" section describes a Settings → Workspace tab that does not exist in the current code — openWorkspaceSettings() is defined in src/client/store/workspace.js but never called, and the settings modal has no Workspaces tab. Manage them from the layout dropdown in the tab bar.