How to restore your previous session on Mac
Note My rebuilds the session for you — the same tabs, in the same order, with the same half-finished text. Here is what actually returns, what you can rely on, and how to shape the session you come back to.
You had eleven tabs open. A log, three source files, a scratchpad you never named, and a config file you were halfway through editing. The app is starting again, and the question is simple: how much of that is coming back?
In Note My the whole set comes back, including the text you had not saved, and none of it needed anything from you in advance. The detail is still worth reading, because knowing precisely what lands in front of you at the next launch is what lets you shut the lid mid-sentence and think nothing of it.
All of it happens on your Mac. There is no account, nothing is uploaded, and no copy of your text goes anywhere in order to come back. A restore works the same with the network off.
What "session" means here
A session is four things, and every one of them comes back:
- Which tabs were open — the set of documents, including never-saved ones.
- Their order — the tabs are rebuilt left to right as you left them.
- Which one was selected — you come back to the tab you were looking at.
- The text you had not committed to disk — the actual characters you typed, waiting in the tab where you left them.
The last one is what people do not expect. A tab with unsaved edits comes back with those edits in place, wearing a leading * on its title and in the window title bar. That star is your one visible sign that a tab holds work you have not written to disk yet.
Read the star as a clear yes-or-no signal: this tab is holding work that has not been written to disk yet. One glance along the strip tells you which tabs still want ⌘S, and the window title carries the same mark for the tab you are in.
What comes back without you asking
Nothing has to be set up in advance. This is what lands in front of you at the next launch.
| What you left | Comes back? | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Unsaved edits in a named file | Yes | The tab reopens with your text, starred |
| A never-saved Untitled scratchpad | Yes | It returns with its text, starred |
| A saved file with nothing pending | Yes | The tab reopens from the file on disk |
| Tab order and the selected tab | Yes | The strip is rebuilt as you left it |
| A pinned tab you always keep open | Yes | It returns pinned, protected as before |
| The width you dragged a tab to | Yes | The strip keeps the proportions you gave it |
Our auto-recovery safety net is what hands back the text you never wrote to disk — the part nothing else could reconstruct. It works on its own, every session, whether or not you were expecting to need it: nothing to switch on, nothing to remember, nothing you can forget to do.
The most an interruption can cost you is the last moment of typing — a word, not an afternoon. The safety net and ⌘S work as a pair: one covers the minutes between saves, the other settles the work for good. If there was no unsaved work waiting, you still get your files back: open, in the same order, with the same tab selected.
Know which sort of tab you are looking at. A starred tab holds work that exists only inside the app; an unstarred one matches the file on disk. Before anything drastic — clearing the strip, running another tool over the folder — clear the stars with ⌘S.
What comes back with each tab
A tab returns with more than its name. The file opens again without sending you back to a file picker, wherever on your Mac you keep it — an external drive, a folder buried in Documents, a synced folder. The language stays as you had it, and our syntax engine colours the file exactly as before, so a restored tab looks like the one you were reading.
The width you dragged the tab to is kept, and so is which tab was in front. You never have to save an arrangement: reorder the strip, pin something, rename a tab, drag a tab edge wider, and that is the strip you come back to. A rename you are still part-way through typing does not count until you commit it, so a half-finished name is never what returns.
Our encoding handling comes back with the tab as well. A file that opened as Windows-1252 returns as Windows-1252, and a file that used Windows line endings does not quietly come back with Unix ones — which matters most for files you did not create.
Pinned tabs across a relaunch
Pinning survives a relaunch: a tab you pinned is still pinned, and still refuses to close, when the app comes back. The reference file you keep open all week is exactly as protected on Friday as it was on Monday.
During a session, pinning also moves a tab to the front of the strip and holds it there, out of reach of an absent-minded ⌘W. When the app comes back, the arrangement is yours to make: drag the pinned tab to the spot you want it in, and that is where you find it at every launch afterwards. A minute spent putting a schema, a log and a scratchpad in the order you think in pays for itself every morning.
When work reappears on its own
Our auto-recovery safety net reaches wider than the tabs you had in front of you. Documents you had been working in are covered too, including scratchpads you never gave a name.
So if the app stopped without warning, work you feared was lost turns up on its own as a *filename tab. The work is simply there, in the tab where you left it, ready to type into. You carry on from where you were. Three things keep that orderly:
- Nothing comes back twice. You will not find two tabs holding the same document, one of them quietly out of date.
- A tidy quit stays tidy. Work you finished, saved and closed does not resurface days later asking to be closed again.
- You get the newest copy, once. One tab, one star — never a pile of stars stacked up on the same title.
If a tab reappears that you were not expecting, read it before you save over anything. Keep whichever version you want and close the other.
The Startup setting, and what it covers
Under Settings ▸ General ▸ Startup there are three choices: Welcome screen (the default), New document, and Automatic, which opens a blank document only if the clipboard has text in it.
That setting governs the empty case: what greets you on the mornings when nothing is waiting. Your work always takes priority over it. A launch that restores a session, a launch that recovers uncommitted work, ⌘N and opening a file all behave the same way whichever of the three you choose, so pick the one you like the look of and leave it. If you see the welcome screen, it means your last session had been saved and closed, and there was nothing held over to bring back.
Your clipboard stays private through all of this. Note My never looks at what it contains, and nothing on it is ever sent anywhere. It notices only whether something text-like is there at all, and only when Startup is set to Automatic. Pasting the clipboard into that new document is a separate switch, off by default.
Starting clean on purpose
Sometimes you want none of it back. Two things clear what a restore would otherwise hand you:
- Saving. ⌘S writes the file, drops the star, and leaves nothing pending for that tab. A saved tab still reopens — it just reopens from the file, which is what you wanted.
- Closing everything. ⇧⌘W closes the tabs and leaves nothing held over for them, so the next launch starts empty. The File-menu route confirms once for the whole set rather than tab by tab, and a tab you pinned holds its ground through it — which is exactly what you pinned it for.
⇧⌘W is the deliberate way to end a session with nothing held over. It is also therefore the one command that throws away uncommitted work on purpose. Read the confirmation before you accept it.
Habits that make a restore boring
The best relaunch is one you do not notice. Two habits get you there.
- Name a scratchpad once it earns a name. An Untitled tab comes back with its text intact, but it comes back Untitled. Press ⌘S the moment a scratchpad becomes something you would miss.
- Close what you have finished with. Every tab you leave open is a tab that returns. A strip you keep tidy is a strip that comes back tidy.
Troubleshooting
The welcome screen appeared instead of my tabs
There was nothing to restore; a setting did not block it. Usually the previous session ended with every tab saved and closed. If you are sure you left unsaved work behind, quit and launch once more before assuming it has gone — launching again does not throw anything away.
A tab came back but the file is gone
If the file was moved or deleted while the app was not running, the tab is kept rather than dropped, and it comes back titled Foo (missing). Your text is still there. ⌘S takes you to Save As so you can put it somewhere real — do that before you carry on editing.
Setting the order your pinned tabs come back in
The pin itself is restored, and the running order is yours to set. Drag the tab to the front of the strip, and that is where you find it at every launch from then on.
A restored tab has a star although I am sure I saved it
Recovered work is always marked as changed, on purpose. Being cautious in that direction costs you a glance; being wrong the other way costs you text. Look at the content, then either save it or close it.
Bringing your panes back after a relaunch
Every tab you left open is there, and the panes are one click away. Choose Multi View from the toolbar and each open tab takes a pane of its own again; Single View collapses back to the tab you are reading whenever you want the full width for one file. Worth doing the moment you are working across several files at once again.
I closed a tab and chose Don't Save
Watch the bottom of the window. A small panel reading "Discarded «Foo.swift» — restore?" appears with a Restore button, and it stays only briefly, so click it while it is there: the tab comes straight back with its content, exactly as you had it. Whichever way you go, the copy already on disk is untouched — discarding a draft never rewrites the file you had saved.
What you can rely on at every launch
Put it together and the promise is short enough to hold in your head. Everything you had open comes back, in the order you left it, with the tab you were reading in front of you. The text you never wrote to disk comes back with it, starred, so a single look along the strip tells you where the pending work is. Your language choice, your colouring, your encoding and your line endings return with each file, which is what makes a restored tab feel like the one you were reading rather than a fresh copy of it.
None of it needs the internet. There is no account to sign in to, nothing is uploaded, and your files never leave your Mac, so the restore you get on a train with the aerial off is the restore you get at your desk.
That is what makes an interruption cheap. A crash, a forced restart, a battery that gives out mid-paragraph: each of them costs you a relaunch and a moment's reading, not an afternoon of work you will never get back. Three things make the most of it.
- Let ⌘S do the permanent part. The safety net covers the gap between saves; saving is what makes a piece of work settled and unstarred. Used together they cover both ends, and the star tells you which end you are at.
- Protect the disk as well as the document. Everything held for you lives on your own machine and goes nowhere else. If what you write is sensitive, turn FileVault on and the whole disk — recovered work included — is covered by it.
- Let the strip say what it means. Stars for work in progress, pins for the files you always want to hand, a tidy row for everything else. Read it once at launch and you know precisely where you stand before you type a character.
Do that for a week and a relaunch stops being an event. You quit when you feel like quitting, restart when the Mac asks, and open the app again expecting to find your desk exactly as you left it.
Frequently asked questions
Does Note My reopen my tabs after a normal quit?
Yes. You get the same restore whether the previous run ended cleanly or was cut short. A clean quit simply means there is usually less to bring back, because you had already saved.
Do I have to switch session restore on first?
It is on from the first launch. Our auto-recovery safety net simply runs, so there is nothing to configure before you start and nothing to remember later. When you want a session not to come back, save and close the tabs, or use ⇧⌘W to close them all, and the next launch starts fresh.
Will a never-saved Untitled tab come back?
Yes, with its text. A tab you never gave a filename is exactly the case our auto-recovery safety net exists for. It returns as an Untitled tab, starred, and it all stays on your Mac — nothing is uploaded to bring it back.
How much work does an interruption actually cost?
The last moment of typing — a word or a line, not a paragraph and never a file. Our large-file engine keeps the safety net running on very large documents as well, so a heavy log or a huge export is looked after while you work on it, rather than left to chance.
Does a restored tab keep its encoding and line endings?
Yes. Our encoding handling returns with the tab, so a file that opened as Windows-1252 comes back as Windows-1252, and a file written with Windows line endings still has them when you save it again. Colouring and the language you chose come back too, which matters most for files somebody else wrote and expects back unchanged.
Does restoring a session read my clipboard?
Your clipboard stays yours. Note My never looks at what it contains, and nothing on it is ever sent anywhere. It notices only whether something text-like is there at all, and only when Startup is set to Automatic. Pasting is a separate switch, off by default.