Terminal Layouts

Save and restore terminal tabs, folders and splits in VS Code and Cursor. For when your agents each have a terminal and you are tired of opening them again.

You leave a tab in the scheduler, a split on the client repo, another one wherever the last agent was working. Reload the window, close the editor, or lose the SSH/WSL connection, and that setup is gone. Terminal Layouts keeps the tabs and the folders, and lets you bookmark a whole set the way you would bookmark tabs in a browser.

Works in VS Code, Cursor, and other VS Code-based editors, locally or over Remote SSH / WSL.

Save what you have open

The Layouts pane sits in the bottom panel, next to Terminal.

• Save all tabs stores the tabs and folders open right now, under a name you choose.
• Click a name to open that set again. Tabs you already have stay open.
• The trash icon deletes a saved layout.

Auto-save of the live setup is off by default. Turn it on from Terminal Layouts: Options (or the Options tab in the Layouts pane) if you want every tab change written to .cursor/terminal-layout.json. Named layouts via Save all tabs still work either way.

Ctrl+Shift+5 splits the current tab and keeps the new pane in the same folder.

Options

Command Palette → Terminal Layouts: Options, or the Options tab next to Saved layouts.

• Restore saved terminals on reload → terminalKeeper.autoRestore in settings.json
• Auto-save open tabs → terminalKeeper.autoSave (default off)
• Max panes, restore delay, tmux prefix

The panel + button is a normal shell. Save and auto-save record that tab and the folder it is in. The next restore opens it as a persistent tab. Closed tabs are dropped, even if their tmux session is still running.

Install

Optional: install tmux on the machine where the terminals run (the remote host when using Remote SSH or WSL). With tmux, each tab is a tmux session and the running processes survive a closed editor or a dropped connection. Without it, restore reopens a fresh shell in each saved folder.

From the marketplace: search for Terminal Layouts in the Extensions view.

From source:

bash install.sh

The script picks the extensions folder of whichever editor it finds (VS Code, VS Code Server, Cursor).

Reload the window. The first time, use Terminal Layouts: New Persistent Terminal so a tab is one Terminal Layouts knows about.

How it works

Layouts are stored in <workspace>/.cursor/terminal-bookmarks.json and the live tabs in <workspace>/.cursor/terminal-layout.json. The same directory is used in every editor, so a layout saved in VS Code opens in Cursor and vice versa.

With tmux, if it is still running after the editor dies, the next open reattaches those same panes. If the host itself shuts down, or tmux is not installed, the folders come back and the processes that were running do not.