Pinned tabs

A pinned tab belongs to no project. It sits above every project in the sidebar as a top-level row with a pin icon, and it is the most durable thing in the app: it can't be closed, it eager-loads on every launch (reattaching surviving sessions, or rebuilding from its saved layout and re-running its commands when they didn't survive — a reboot, an exit, a crash), and if a session dies mid-run the dimmed row stays put, restoring the same way when you select it. Pin the dev server, the log tail, the ssh session you always want around.

Pinning and unpinning

• Pin — drag a tab to the very top of the sidebar, above every project, and drop it there (with nothing pinned yet, a Pin Tab band appears to mark the spot; after that the insertion line does). (Dropping onto an existing pinned row pins at that slot instead.) Also in the tab's right-click menu and the command palette, and bindable in Settings → Keymaps.
• Unpin — right-click a pinned row → Unpin Tab, or drag it into a project section. Unpinning is a move: the tab returns to the project it came from (its shells keep running). Nothing is killed by pinning or unpinning.

At pin time Macterm captures the tab's layout the same way Save Layout does — splits, each pane's working directory, and whatever command is running becomes the pane's run:. The capture then tracks the tab: starting or stopping a process in a pinned pane updates the saved layout (and pinned.yaml) within a couple of seconds, and it refreshes once more on quit — so a restore re-runs the last thing the tab was doing.

Closing stops, never removes

⌘W and Close Tab on a pinned tab unload it: its processes end, but the row stays (dimmed) and so does its saved layout — select it to start it again, and the next launch starts it automatically. The same happens when its sessions end on their own — typing exit, a crash, a reboot. The only way a pinned tab actually goes away is unpinning it.

pinned.yaml

The pinned set lives in ~/.config/macterm/projects/pinned.yaml — the one layout file Macterm maintains automatically (on pin, unpin, and quit). It's still yours to edit:

path: <pinned>
tabs:
  - name: dev server
    cwd: ~/dev/api
    run: npm run dev
  - cwd: ~/dev/api

• Add an entry and it appears as a pinned tab, spawning on the next launch.
• Remove an entry and the tab is unpinned on the next launch (moved back to its origin project — never killed).
• Edit an entry (run:, cwd:, splits) and the change applies the next time that tab restores.

Entries carry no identifiers: Macterm matches them back to your pinned tabs by name:, then by content, then by position. Naming an entry keeps a heavy edit unambiguous.

Your edits are never clobbered: Macterm re-reads the file before every write and folds external changes in first. If the file doesn't parse mid-edit, auto-saving pauses (with an alert) until it parses again. Because it lives with your other layout files, pinned.yaml dotfile-syncs — the pinned set follows you across machines, while the live sessions stay per-machine.

Keyboard navigation treats the pinned rows like a project of their own: Next/Previous Tab in Project cycles through them while a pinned tab is active, and the global Next/Previous Tab walks pinned tabs first, then every project's.

Over the control CLI, --project pinned addresses the pinned workspace (macterm tab list --project pinned).