Every chat belongs to a folder: a branch, a worktree or a Topic. Select one in the sidebar first; the tab strip above the panes then holds that folder’s chats, terminals and files.
Open a new chat
Click the + at the right end of the tab strip, New chat in api (with your project’s name). A new chat tab opens as a draft: just the composer, with nothing behind it yet.
A draft costs nothing. No agent process is started and no session is created until you send the first message, so you can open one, set it up, and close it without leaving anything behind.
- Select a branch, worktree or Topic in the sidebar.
- Click + in the tab strip.
- Optionally pick the agent, account, model, effort and mode from the composer’s pills (see Models, effort and modes).
- Type your first message and press
Enter. The agent starts, the draft becomes a live chat, and your message is sent as soon as the agent is ready.
If the first message cannot start a session, for example the agent is signed out, the tab goes back to being a draft with your message still in it and the reason above the composer.
Which agent a new chat uses
A new draft opens on what this project last used: the same agent and account. With no history it uses your Settings default for that agent’s account, and otherwise the first agent you have turned on. A project that only allows some agents (see Limiting agents per project) always opens on one it allows.
The + is greyed out, with the reason in its tooltip, when no branch is selected (Select a branch first) or no agent is turned on (No agent enabled. Turn one on in Settings.).
Chats that open by themselves
- Creating a worktree or branch from the sidebar opens a chat draft in it, so it does not land on an empty strip, when an agent is turned on and its account is not signed out. A worktree folder that already has tabs keeps those instead. Selecting a worktree that already exists opens nothing, and closing your last tab does not bring a draft back. The draft steps aside for whatever you open next, until you type in it yourself: New session replaces it, an issue’s prompt is written into it, and the first + brings it forward instead of opening a second empty draft.
- Creating a Topic selects it and opens a chat draft at its home the same way, unless something is already open there.
- Starting a branch from an issue opens a draft with the issue written in as the prompt, and a from link above the composer that opens the issue.
- A chat that another chat spawns, or that the Autopilot starts, opens as a tab in its folder.
The launch menu
The caret beside +, Launch an agent session, opens everything else you can start in this folder:
| Row | What it opens |
|---|---|
| Terminal | A plain login shell, in this folder |
| Claude (terminal) | Claude’s own terminal interface in a terminal tab. With two Claude accounts there is one row per account, such as Claude (work, terminal) |
| Continue this session in chat | The selected session, resumed as a chat |
| Continue this session in terminal | The selected session, resumed in the agent’s terminal interface |
| Close 3 tabs not started | Closes restored tabs you have not opened since the last launch |
| Claude (yolo) | Claude’s terminal interface with every permission check skipped (--dangerously-skip-permissions) |
Rows for agents you turned off are not shown. A row an agent’s project rules refuse is greyed with Not allowed in this project.
Pick up an earlier session
Every session ever run in the selected folder is in Session history, the clock button to the right of the launch control.
- Click the history button. A panel opens under it with a search box.
- Type to filter by session name.
- Use
ArrowUpandArrowDownand pressEnter, or click a session, to open it.
The list has Open now at the top, the sessions that have a tab open, and then the rest grouped by when they were last active: Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 days, Previous 30 days and Older. Each row shows the agent, the session’s status dot, the account when you have more than one, and how long ago it was active. A lock marks a session the Autopilot is driving.
A small badge on the history button counts sessions running in this folder that have no tab open, for example one started from the CLI or left running when you closed its tab.
What opening a session does
Opening a session that is already open in a tab just brings that tab forward. Otherwise it opens on the surface you chose in Settings > Chat > Open sessions in:
- Chat (the default) resumes it as a chat, with its history read back from disk.
- Terminal (agent tab) resumes it in the agent’s own terminal interface.
A session that is running somewhere else, in a terminal outside Tori for example, opens in a terminal tab instead of a chat, because driving one session from two places at once damages its history.
Opening a session reads its history but does not start the agent. The agent is started when you send the first message, and it resumes the same session, so the conversation carries on where it stopped.
Rename or delete a session
Right-click a session in the history panel, or use its row menu:
- Rename… gives it a name of your own instead of its first prompt.
- Delete asks first. For Claude it deletes the session’s transcript, which cannot be undone, along with its checkpoints. For an agent that keeps its own history, Tori can only stop listing it: Forget this session? The agent keeps its copy.
Deleting a session closes any tab showing it and drops its saved queue. Sessions the Autopilot is driving cannot be deleted.
Sessions from before a folder was recreated
If you delete a worktree and create one again at the same path, the old sessions are kept apart under Historical (N), folded, so they do not mix with the new work. Click the heading to see them, and Adopt to list them normally again.
Chat or terminal
Every agent can run two ways:
- As a chat, the view these pages describe: the composer, tool cards, the model and mode pills, the queue, rewind.
- In its own terminal interface, in a real terminal tab, exactly as it runs in any terminal.
The conversation is the same either way. Use Continue this session in chat or Continue this session in terminal from the launch menu to move one between the two without starting over.
A session in a terminal tab still gets its row in the sidebar, its status dot, notifications and checkpoints. It does not get the model picker, the tool cards, the queue or the session menu; those belong to the chat view.
Tabs come back after a relaunch on the surface they were saved on, whatever Open sessions in says.
Restored tabs
When Tori starts, every tab you had open comes back in order, but nothing is started until you click one. A restored chat shows its history and starts its agent only when you send. A restored terminal gets a fresh prompt. Drafts come back with what you had typed.
Close N tabs not started in the launch menu clears every restored tab you have not touched, in one go.