Attach and restart
Two verbs act on a session that already exists. Attach opens it again. Restart stops it and brings it back.
Attach
Section titled “Attach”Attach resumes a session in its own checkout, under the account and profile it was launched with. You do not have to remember any of that; Nightdesk replays it.
A session running as a background agent is opened through the harness that is already running it, because two copies of a harness cannot write one conversation. If Nightdesk cannot find that session in the harness’s own listing, it hands you the harness’s picker instead of guessing — the picker wakes nothing, and Attach never restarts a session. A Codex session attaches through its daemon, in that thread’s own home.
Branch a Copy attaches to a fork of the conversation instead of the conversation itself. You get a second session that starts from the same history, and the original is left alone.
Restart
Section titled “Restart”Restart stops the session and brings it back. It always asks first, including when the session looks idle: closing a session only ever acts on one that has already exited, but restarting kills a live one, possibly in the middle of a turn.
What the confirmation tells you depends on what you are restarting:
- A terminal pane — the pane’s scrollback is lost, the conversation is not.
- A background agent — the dialog names the agent and, when the installed CLI is a different version, the version it will come back on. It makes no promise about scrollback either way, because re-attaching a background agent re-renders the same conversation.
Where the button is, and what it says
Section titled “Where the button is, and what it says”The bar hides Restart only when Nightdesk can stand behind a match: a reading of the installed CLI taken recently, and taken after this session’s conversation began, that agrees with the version the session is running. Every other state shows the button:
- Restart to roll back when the installed CLI sorts below the one the session is running.
- Restart to update for any other difference between the two — the harness’s own words.
- Restart, plain, when Nightdesk could not read one of the two versions, or read them the same but from a reading it cannot stand behind. Nightdesk would rather show you a verb it cannot label than hide the bar’s only session verb over a reading it could not make.
File ▸ Restart Session… carries the same verb whether or not the button is showing, so a hidden button costs you the reminder, never the verb.
One at a time
Section titled “One at a time”A restart is not interruptible. The button and its File menu twin are both disabled while one is running, and pressing again immediately afterwards does nothing.
Every restart is recorded
Section titled “Every restart is recorded”Whatever the outcome, it lands in the activity feed: Restarted name or Updated name, with the session’s context and the version it moved between on the caption line. A restart that failed appears as a failure, not as a nudge — the two are different things and the feed keeps them apart.