Window state must be restored after a restart

What it is

Quitting an app is not flipping the desk. When someone sits down the next day, the window should return to the geometry and content it had on the way out: which display, position, size, maximized or split, which documents, scroll offset, uncommitted input. Window state restoration is working memory moved outside the head. The spatial arrangement is itself the cue people use to find the task again.

What comes back is “how I had laid it out,” not a default welcome screen. A fresh session that starts from a blank layout asks them to set up the bench again.

Why it happens

Desktop work is spread in space. Positions across windows and displays function as external memory: reference on the left, the draft on the right, logs along the bottom. Work in the Robertson and Czerwinski line on large displays and the Task Gallery keeps finding that people reconstruct “where I was” from window layout. If those coordinates wipe when the process dies, spatial memory no longer matches anything in the world, and recovering the task is close to starting over.

Persisting only x, y, width, and height is not enough. Maximized flags, the owning display, split ratios, document identity, caret or scroll offset—drop one and the size is right while the work is not. After a display is unplugged, old coordinates may fall onto a screen that no longer exists; restore has to pull the window onto a display that is still there, not create an invisible window in a hole in virtual desktop space. Crash recovery and a clean quit should write the same state, or people learn never to quit normally.

Studying it

Spatial-memory experiments give someone a window layout, wait, then ask them to rebuild it on an empty desktop or to judge whether a window is still where it was. The Task Gallery and Data Mountain line uses spatial position as a retrieval cue. Closer to a product: finish a multi-window task, force-quit, and time “until I can continue.”

Independent variables: whether geometry is restored, whether documents and scroll are restored, the gap between quit and reopen, whether the display count changed. Dependent variables: layout reconstruction error, time to recover the task, “I cannot find the window” incidents after launch.

Lab gaps are minutes; real gaps are overnight or a system update. Overnight, spatial memory is still there while display topology may have changed—measure those separately.

Where it stops holding

A first launch has nothing to restore; give a clear empty state, do not fake “your last windows.” Shared machines, guest accounts, and private sessions should not write document contents back to disk. If a file was deleted or its path broke, geometry may still return; content restore must fail in a way that can be understood. Games and slideshows usually return to the desktop shell, not last night’s level. Browsers make “continue last tabs” an option because a session may hold pages no one else should see—restore can be the default, but it must be switchable.

Applying it

• Write the same state on quit, crash, and system restart: display, position, size, maximized, open objects, scroll or caret.
• If the target display is gone, place the window fully visible on the primary display; do not create it at vanished coordinates.
• Verify by arranging two windows at different sizes and positions, opening a document scrolled to the middle, force-quitting, and reopening. Geometry should match; the document should still sit at the middle. Unplug a display and relaunch: the window must appear on a screen that still exists.

Related

• Within the group: K2.01.1 Windows can be resized freely, so layout must stay usable at every size · K2.01.2 Extremely narrow and extremely wide windows both need handling
• Adjacent: K1.08 App Switching and Background Reclamation · K8.01 Task Continuity · K2.02 Multiple Displays
• Search terms: session restore · window geometry · spatial memory of windows