Pick up where you left off
Goal: continue today exactly as yesterday's unfinished work left off; try a different path without breaking the existing history.
Sessions are saved automatically
Sessions live with their directory: rind --session <id> finds the directory a session belongs to when resuming it. A session ID looks like 20260825_101530_ab12cd34, and appears in the startup banner and in /status.
/sessions list recent sessions
/rename <name> give the current session a memorable name
/status session ID, name, model and connection, latest sampling usage
Resuming and forking
| Scenario | What to do |
|---|---|
| Continue where you left off | rind --session <id> resumes it directly; the startup banner replays a snippet of the last exchange first, so you never resume blind |
| Browse past sessions | /sessions lists recent sessions; pick with ↑↓ and Enter opens it in another CLI window, leaving the current one alone |
| Take a different path from some midpoint | /fork, select that message and fork a new session from it; the original history is untouched |
| History too long, want to slim it down deliberately | /compact, see below |
/fork copies the history up to the selected message; running tasks and credential-like state are not copied with it. After the fork, the two sessions do not affect each other. Note that switching sessions never rewrites workspace files - history is history, files are files.
What to do when the context overflows
A long session will eventually hit the model window. Rind does not delete history:
/contextopens the context panel: two pages, the first is this session's composition (system prompt, RIND.md, Skill catalog, messages... how much each takes up), the second is budget and usage. Tab / ← / → switch pages, Esc closes./compactcompacts actively: it replaces the old history with a handoff summary, and the most recent messages are kept as they are. After compaction, the session can continue seamlessly.
Compaction replaces only the model view; the original record on disk is untouched, so it is normal for /context to show "on disk but not carried by the model". See compaction handoff for more on the mechanism.