My terminal came back blank after I switched apps

This is expected, and it fixes itself. iOS suspends and sometimes kills backgrounded apps to save power — dotMux doesn’t fight that. Your work is safe because it runs on the server, inside tmux or herdr. When you return, dotMux re-attaches to your session and rebuilds your tabs and panes exactly where they were. Long-running jobs you left running kept running the whole time.

Why a pane can come back blank

tmux only replays new output on re-attach, not a pane’s existing screen — a quiet pane has nothing to redraw until its next write. dotMux automatically nudges tmux to repaint each visible pane right after re-attaching, so the content reappears within a moment. If a pane stays blank, switching tabs or sending any keystroke forces a repaint.

When the connection drops while you’re looking

If a tmux or herdr connection drops while it’s on screen — a Wi-Fi switch, a server restart — dotMux reconnects at once, keeping the last frame visible under a Reconnecting… notice you can cancel. If it keeps dropping, it stops retrying and shows a Disconnected notice with the reason, Close and Reconnect. Plain shells, sessions that ended on the server, and connections you closed are never reconnected for you.

Plain shells

A plain SSH shell — a host set to run without tmux — has no server-side session to re-attach to, so after a suspension it shows the disconnected state and waits for you to reconnect deliberately. That’s by design: dotMux won’t silently drop you into a different fresh shell.