The terminal.app keeps the tabs after a restart and it even shows the content of the buffers. But all open tabs are at the home directory rather than the working directory they were in at shutdown. I am using tcsh and I learned that this is the problem. It works for bash and Chris Page [posted something for zsh][1], but I do not know how to adapt this to tcsh. [1]: http://superuser.com/questions/313650/resume-zsh-terminal-os-x-lion/328148#328148