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Quitting and the daemon

What keeps running when you close Tori, how an update waits for your sessions, what a crash costs, and how to reach a terminal tab from any shell.

Your chats, terminal tabs, the Autopilot and remote access run in a background process, tori daemon, not in the window. Quitting Tori closes the window and nothing else: a turn in flight finishes, a shell keeps running, and the phone keeps its connection. Open Tori again and every tab is where you left it.

Closing the window

The red close button hides the window without asking. Tori keeps running in the menu bar and the Dock: the menu bar icon still lists your sessions, and Mac notifications still arrive. Click Tori in the Dock, or Open Tori in the menu bar icon, to bring the window back as you left it. With Keep unsaved edits across a quit on, unsaved edits are stashed as the window hides, so they come back even if Tori is ended while it is hidden.

Cmd+W closes the current tab, never the window.

Quitting

Cmd+Q, or Quit Tori in the Tori menu or the menu bar icon, asks Quit Tori? first, bringing the window back if it was hidden: Sessions and terminals keep running in the background. Check Also stop running sessions to end them too; see Stopping the daemon. Cancel and Tori stays open.

When you open Tori again after quitting:

  • A chat that was working is still working, or has finished while you were away, and its tab shows everything it did.
  • A terminal tab is still running its shell. It shows the screen only once you look at it, by replaying what the shell printed while the window was closed. Tori keeps the last 2 MB of each shell’s output, so a long build log is cut from the top.
  • Questions and permission prompts raised while the window was closed are waiting for you.

After you quit, the tori CLI and MCP server keep working. A chat started with tori spawn or from the phone runs at once, and the window opens a tab for it when it next opens. Mac notifications come from Tori itself, so once you quit, the phone app and tori session wait are how you hear that a session needs you. Close the window instead of quitting to keep them.

Remote access with the window closed

Remote access, once on, stays on when you quit: Tori keeps listening on the address you picked, and the phone works with the window closed. The Mac is kept from idle sleeping only while a phone is connected or a session is working. Closing the lid still puts it to sleep. Turn remote access off in Settings > Remote to stop listening.

Updates

After you install a new version and open it, the old daemon keeps running your sessions. It restarts into the new version on its own once no session is working. Until then the title bar says Update waiting for 2 sessions, with the count of sessions still working.

Restart now restarts the daemon at once, and stops any turn in flight.

Now and then a new version cannot talk to the old daemon at all. Then the pill says Restart needed for the update, and Tori cannot reach your sessions until you click Restart now.

When the daemon restarts or crashes

A restart for an update, or a crash, ends what the daemon was holding:

  • Shells in terminal tabs end with it.
  • A chat that was running comes back as an open tab with its transcript, and picks up its session again when you send the next message.
  • A message sent to such a chat from the phone, or with tori steer, starts it again too.

The window crashing does not touch your sessions: the daemon holds them, and opening Tori again shows them running.

Tori starts the daemon when you open it, and macOS starts it again at login and after a crash. It runs as a LaunchAgent, at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/app.gettori.tori.daemon.plist, and writes what it does to ~/.config/tori/run/daemon.log.

If it fails to start five times in a row, it stops trying. The title bar then says Daemon stopped after 5 failed starts, with Try again; the log says why. When the window cannot reach the daemon for another reason, a toast says The Tori daemon cannot be reached, so tori and MCP tools cannot reach Tori, followed by the reason.

Open a terminal tab from any shell

tori attach shows a terminal tab’s shell in a terminal outside Tori:

Terminal window
$ tori sessions --live
$ tori attach 7c1e9a2f-4b0d-4e2a-9f61-3d8c2b7a5e14
tori: attaching to 7c1e9a2f-4b0d-4e2a-9f61-3d8c2b7a5e14, Ctrl-\ detaches
  • It takes the session id of an agent running in a terminal tab, as tori sessions --live lists it, or a terminal tab’s own id.
  • It replays what the shell printed, then you type into the same shell the tab shows. The tab and the terminal both see everything, and the shell takes the size of whichever was resized last.
  • Ctrl-\ detaches and leaves the shell running. When the shell exits, it prints tori: <id> exited with <code>.
  • It refuses to run inside a Tori terminal tab, and it needs a real terminal, not a pipe.

A chat tab is not a shell, so it cannot be attached; follow it with tori session tail instead.

Stopping the daemon

To end every session for now, check Also stop running sessions when you quit. The daemon stops with the window, and shells and turns in flight end. It starts again the next time you open Tori, or at login. If it cannot be stopped, a toast says why and Tori stays open.

To stop it and keep it off:

Terminal window
tori daemon --uninstall

stops the daemon, ends every session it holds, removes the LaunchAgent so it does not start at login, and deletes ~/.config/tori/rpc.json, so nothing that read its token can reach Tori. Opening Tori afterwards does not start it again by itself: the title bar says Daemon uninstalled, and Start installs it again.