Session history¶

Session history is an opt-in record of terminal output that outlives the session, remains searchable, and can be replayed as it was displayed. For a plain-text file written while the session runs, see log files.

What is recorded¶

Remote output is recorded byte for byte, including escape sequences, which is what makes exact replay possible.

Input is not recorded unless input capture is enabled for that session. The terminal-actions menu can start, pause and stop logging mid-session and toggle input capture. Text a host's anti-idle types counts as input.

Searching and reading¶

The history dialog searches the normalized transcript, which is the text with escape sequences removed, using debounced cursor-paged queries. Filters are host, connection type (SSH, local, serial, Telnet) and date range.

Opening a session displays its transcript, and allows copying the complete clean log, renaming the session, pinning the session so it is never evicted, or deleting it.

A session is recorded under the title of its tab. Renaming the tab while the session is recording renames the session too; sessions that already ended keep their title.

Rename gives a session a name of your own, such as pre-change config, which the history list, the quick launcher and exported filenames use instead of the recorded title. Both the name and the recorded title are searchable. Clear the name to show the recorded title again.

Enable Show timestamps (UTC) to prefix each line with an ISO 8601 timestamp, including milliseconds. The toggle also applies to Clean log downloads and copying the complete clean log. It starts off when opening the dialog.

For new recordings, each timestamp is when Muxus received the last change to that line, including command echoes and terminal redraws. It is not the remote shell's exact command execution time. Older recordings fall back to approximate event times; the dialog indicates when this applies. Raw logs and HTML replay keep their existing formats.

Comparing¶

Compare with…, the arrows button beside the copy button, opens the selected session in the compare dialog. Compare with… in the dialog picks the other side:

• an open terminal's output, or its selection when it has one;
• a recent session history record, newest first;
• a Local file…, or a File on a connected session, by path, over SFTP.

To check a router before and after a change, with history enabled for it:

1. Before the change, connect, run show running-config and close the tab. After the change, do the same in a new tab.
2. In the history dialog, select the later session and click Compare with….
3. In the compare dialog, click Compare with… and choose the earlier session.

Sessions are compared as their clean log, without timestamps. The first text is on the left; Swap sides exchanges them. Side by side and Inline switch the view.

Export diff saves the comparison, with these options applied, as a unified diff (.diff, the format of diff -u, three lines of context).

The same dialog opens from the terminal's context menu and the file browser. Files must be UTF-8 text of at most 8 MiB.

Exports¶

The HTML replay requires only a browser.

Log files¶

A log file is a plain-text record of a session, written while it runs and kept apart from history. There is nothing to export afterwards: the file is complete when the session ends, and readable at any point before that.

Log session to file… in the terminal-actions menu or a tab's context menu asks where to write, offering a free name in the log folder; the desktop app shows the system save dialog. An existing file is added to, never replaced. Stop logging to file closes the file, as does the end of the session, and in the desktop app Show log file opens its folder.

To log every session, turn on Write log files in the default policy, the local terminal policy or a host's logging settings. Each session then gets a new file named from the log file settings. A name that is already taken gets a number, such as router1_2026-10-04_09-15-00-1.log.

The file holds the same text as the Clean log export: output without escape sequences, connection messages, and a line whenever logging starts, pauses, resumes or stops. Pausing and input recording in the terminal-actions menu apply to the log file as well as to history.

The log file settings are in Settings → Session logging:

The file name fills in {host}, {title} (the tab title), {kind} (ssh, local, serial or telnet), {date} and {time}, both in local time. A / starts a subfolder, so {host}/{date}_{time}.log keeps one folder per host. Characters that file names cannot hold are replaced with _.

Log files are ordinary files: history retention and quotas never remove them. On macOS and Linux, new log files are readable only by you.

Storage, quotas and eviction¶

History is stored outside the application database. A dedicated worker writes framed raw events into rotated zstd-compressed segments, and batches normalized transcript chunks into a separate FTS5 database.

When the quota is reached, the oldest unpinned completed sessions are evicted down to an 85% low-water mark. Active sessions are never evicted. If storage is exhausted, logging suspends itself and the terminal continues to operate. Usage, quota, retention and the storage location are shown and adjustable in Settings → Session logging.