Confusion about domains and their persistence of windows, tabs and panes

[jasontheiler]

What Operating System(s) are you running on?

Windows

Which Wayland compositor or X11 Window manager(s) are you using?

No response

WezTerm version

20241031-235112-0983ae90

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Hi everyone!

I've been using WezTerm for quite some time now and I've been extremely happy with it. However, I've not been using most of its features until now. For my multiplexing needs I've been using tmux for a long time. But now I want to explore whether WezTerm can replace tmux for me entirely.

So, I've studied the WezTerm docs and tried to get a hang of WezTerm's multiplexing. It took me a while to understand the difference in terminology coming from tmux, but I think I got most of it.

Having said that, I'm still a little confused about how domains are supposed to work. I understand that WezTerm always connects to a certain domain which then manages the windows, tabs and panes. By default it just creates a local domain, but it can be configured to connect to another (unix-, SSH-, TLS- or WSL-) domain.

On my private computer I use Windows 11 with WSL2 and I just had WezTerm open a WSL2 shell via the default_prog config option until now:

config.default_prog = { "wsl", "--cd", "~" }

It's not fancy but it worked quite well for spawning a single shell where I would enter tmux. On the Multiplexing page I discovered that I can connect to a unix socket like so:

config.unix_domains = {
  { name = "unix" },
}

config.default_gui_startup_args = { "connect", "unix" }

This worked quite well and now it persisted all my tabs and panes when I close and reopen WezTerm, just like I wanted. Later I discovered that I can also connect to a WSL domain that WezTerm creates automatically where I wouldn't have to set default_prog manually:

config.default_domain = "WSL:Arch" -- or whatever your WSL distro is called

This however doesn't seem to persist any tabs or panes and I'm not sure why? After trying out the unix domain I thought that domains are supposed to manage and also persist tabs and panes, but the WSL domain doesn't seem to do that. I don't want lose my workspaces, tabs and panes when I (accidentally) close my WezTerm window.

I would really appreciate it if someone could tell me what's wrong here, because I'm not entirely sure if I misunderstood WezTerm domains.

What I want to achieve first and foremost is to have persistent workspaces, tabs and panes like I have with tmux.