Docs / Sessions
Sessions and limits
A session is one terminal on one machine. Everything below follows from that.
What counts as a session?
One running terminal that TermLink is sharing. Run termlink twice on the same machine and that is two sessions, not one — the unit is the terminal, not the computer.
Sessions are named after the directory they were started in, which is why a single host can show up as several cards with different names. It is usually the fastest way to tell two jobs apart.
How many can run at once?
Two on Free, eight on Pro. That is the only difference between the plans.
The cap counts sessions, not viewers and not machines. You can watch the same sessions from a laptop, a desktop, and a phone at the same time without using any of it up, and you are not charged by how many computers you register.
Closing a session frees its slot immediately. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.
Do background sessions keep running?
Yes. Switching to another session does not tear the previous one down — every connected session stays live, and each one keeps reporting its most recent line to its card in the list.
That is what makes the list worth looking at: you read one line per session and go to whichever needs a human. It holds on mobile too — moving between the hosts screen and the terminal never drops a session.
Running several at once in practice is covered in managing multiple sessions.
What happens when I close the browser?
Nothing, as far as the session is concerned. It lives in a terminal on your machine, not in the tab. Reconnect and the screen is repainted as the session left it, terminal UI and all.
The thing that does end a session is the host process stopping. TermLink is not a background service, so closing the terminal it runs in — or ending the SSH session that started it — takes the machine offline. On a remote box, start it inside tmux or screen.
If your list says Hosts are offline, that is almost always this — troubleshooting.
Can someone else see a session?
Only if you share it. A session can be shared with one other Google account from the web client, and it is off until you do that.
Revoking access takes effect within about half a minute rather than instantly. What the relay itself can and cannot see is a separate question, and it is answered on the security page — including the parts that are not encrypted end to end.
Is there anything besides the terminal?
A file browser. You can browse the host's files and open them from the web client without switching to a shell command to do it.
Sessions that are not running an agent at all are normal here — a build, a log you are tailing, a shell you left mid-thought. Nothing about a session is agent-shaped.
Next: Auto-Yes for keeping a long run moving while you are away, or the CLI reference.