If you've ever kicked off something slow at the office — a big export, an overnight job, a long-running script — gone home, and then had to log back in to a fresh screen and work out what actually happened while you were driving, you already understand what Reach Sessions is for.

The usual way to get back into a machine gives you a new door into the same room. Reach Sessions gives you the room exactly as you left it.

What it does, in plain terms

A Reach Session is a working session — a terminal — that lives on the host machine, not on the device you're looking at it from. Your office PC, a server, a spare box in the corner: it runs there and keeps running. Any of your own devices can then attach to that live session, see everything that's happened, keep working, and detach without stopping anything.

Close the laptop. Reattach from a different machine an hour later. It's all still there — the output, the running task, the lot. You're not restarting; you're picking back up.

Why that matters for a small business

  • Long jobs don't trap you at one desk. Start the migration, the backup, the build before you leave — check in on it from home on the same session, not a guess based on log files.
  • One less thing to babysit. Hand a slow task to a machine that stays on, and look in on it from wherever you are.
  • Your tools, your machine, your control. The work stays on your host. Other devices just get a live window onto it, and only your own devices can see it automatically — reaching anyone else's machine needs you to deliberately share it.

And if you've started using AI the way a lot of small teams now do — a coding assistant, an automation agent working through a task — the same idea applies. Run the agent in a session on a machine that stays on, and look in on it, or nudge it, from your laptop or (increasingly) your phone. The long-running work doesn't need you glued to one screen.

How you'd actually use it

If you're comfortable at a terminal, it's two commands: start hosting on the machine that should keep the work (reach host), then from another device list what's running (reach sessions) and jump in (reach connect). There's also a toggle in the Reach desktop app — "Host sessions on this PC" — so the machine offers up its sessions without you thinking about it.

Behind the scenes Reach takes the fast, private route when it can — a direct connection between your two devices when they're on the same network — and quietly falls back to its secure relay when they're not (you at home, the host at the office). You don't configure any of that; it just connects.

What it isn't (yet)

We'd rather be straight with you about the edges:

  • It's for terminal/working sessions today — great for the long-running, keep-it-alive kind of work, and for anyone comfortable with a command line or running tools that way. It isn't a full remote-desktop replacement; Reach already does screen sharing separately.
  • Phone control is growing, not finished. You can reach a session from a phone; the richer "steer a long-running job from your pocket" experience is where we're heading next, not everything it'll eventually be.
  • One job per machine for now — a given PC either shares its screen or hosts sessions at a time, not both at once. That's a limit we'll lift.

The core, though, is live and in daily use: your work sits on a machine that stays on, and it follows you to whatever device you open next. If the thing you keep losing is where you were up to when you moved between machines, this is the fix.

Reach Sessions is part of TYO Reach. If you're already a Reach user, it's in the desktop app and the reach command line. New to Reach? Start here.