Sessions

A Session in Probe is a saved snapshot of captured traffic — every request and response Probe recorded between Start and Save. Sessions live in browser-style tabs at the top of the log table. One tab is always the recording tab where new traffic lands; the others hold saved sessions you've opened for review, or traffic you've duplicated or imported.

Sessions are how you keep traffic across app restarts, how you bookmark a reproduction of a bug, and how you share captures with teammates.

Tabs

The tab bar sits above the log table. Each tab holds its own captured entries — switching tabs swaps the log table content and the Detail panel; the filter bar and its search stay as they are.

Tab basics:

• New tab — click + at the right of the tab bar and choose New Session: the new tab becomes the recording tab, and new traffic flows into it. View → New Session (Cmd+T on macOS) opens a tab too, but it takes over recording only when no other tab is recording — right-click it and choose Move Recording Here to move recording there.
• Switch tabs — click a tab. View → Next Session and View → Previous Session (Shift+Cmd+→ / Shift+Cmd+← on macOS) step through the session tabs.
• Rename — double-click a tab name.
• Close — click the × on a tab. If it has unsaved changes (the dirty marker is showing), Probe asks before discarding. Choose Save to keep that tab's traffic as a saved session first — even when it isn't the tab you're looking at. Requests that arrive while Probe saves it go to the tab that records next. If the save fails, the tab stays open with its traffic.
• Reorder — drag tabs to rearrange.
• Right-click a tab for Move Recording Here, Save Session… (on any tab with unsaved changes — it saves that tab even while you're looking at another one, which stays in front), Duplicate Session (copies the tab with its rows, which keep their numbers), Close Tab, and Close Other Sessions (which asks about each tab with unsaved changes in turn).

The recording tab is the one currently capturing live traffic. Only one tab is recording at a time; saved tabs are always read-only.

Dirty marker

A tab with unsaved changes shows an asterisk after its name (Session 1 *) — new traffic in the recording tab or an import puts it there. The asterisk clears when you save.

Saving a session

Press Cmd+S on macOS, or use File → Save Session… on Windows, to save the tab you're looking at. Probe asks for a name, then:

1. The tab takes that name.
2. The tab becomes read-only — no new traffic flows into it.
3. The dirty * marker clears.
4. A fresh tab opens; when you saved the recording tab, the fresh one takes over recording as soon as you click Save, so requests that arrive while Probe writes the session land there and capture continues without a gap.

An empty tab has nothing to save: Probe tells you so instead of asking for a name.

Saved sessions are stored locally in a SQLite database in Probe's data directory — ~/.probe/probe.db on macOS, %USERPROFILE%\.probe\probe.db on Windows. To hand a session to a teammate, export it from the Session Manager and you'll get a .pro file. On Windows, right-click a .pro file (or a .gmp from an earlier version) and choose Open with → Probe to import it; if Probe is already running, the file opens in that window.

Session Manager

Open it from View → Sessions. The Session Manager lists every saved session on this machine and lets you:

• Open — load a session into a new tab.
• Rename — change the display name.
• Export — write the session to a .pro file anywhere on disk.
• Delete — remove a saved session. Tabs already open with that session stay open until closed.

The header has an Import button for picking a .pro file from disk and opening it as a new read-only tab.

File format

Probe sessions use the .pro extension. Files contain the request and response data — headers, query strings, bodies — for every entry in the saved tab, except bodies over 5 MB when you ticked Exclude request/response bodies larger than 5 MB while saving.

.gmp files from earlier versions of Probe still open on import. Probe only writes .pro for new exports.

# macOS — export the session from the Session Manager,
# then share the resulting .pro file
scp ~/Downloads/login-bug.pro teammate@host:/tmp/

Sharing sessions with teammates

A .pro file is everything someone needs to see what you saw:

1. Reproduce the bug in Probe; press Cmd+S (macOS) or use File → Save Session… (Windows) to save.
2. View → Sessions, find the saved entry, click Export, pick a destination.
3. Send the .pro file (chat, email, attachment).
4. The recipient chooses File → Import… (Cmd+O on macOS) or the Import button in View → Sessions, and picks the file. The session opens as a new read-only tab and joins their saved sessions.

Bodies, headers, timing, and connection data all travel with the file, so a teammate can dig into the Detail panel, search across headers and bodies, and replay individual requests in the Composer — without ever needing to re-run your scenario.

Caution

A .pro file may contain sensitive payloads (auth tokens, user data, API keys). Treat them like log files — don't post them in public channels.

Multi-select traffic actions

You can act on more than one log row at a time. Select multiple rows in the log table:

• Cmd/Ctrl-click to add or remove individual rows from the selection.
• Shift-click to select a contiguous range.

Right-click anywhere in the selection for the multi-select menu:

• Save N to Saved Folder — copies the selected entries into one of the Saved folders in the sidebar.
• Save N to Collection — adds each selected request to a Composer collection (you pick which collection and folder). This is the bridge between captured live traffic and the Composer: capture a flow, hand the requests to the Composer, and iterate on them as editable, repeatable calls.
• Export N requests — write the selection out (cURL, raw HTTP, .pro, etc.).
• Compare (when exactly two rows are selected) — opens the Compare Requests dialog. It has Request, Response and Summary tabs, each split into Original (the earlier request) on the left and New (the later one) on the right. Headers show as key/value rows and bodies as a line diff (JSON is pretty-printed first with its keys sorted, so a different key order alone is not a change). Bodies too large to compare line by line show Too large to compare line by line instead of a diff; when nothing else differs, the summary bar then says the body was not compared rather than No changes. Turn on Changes only to hide everything that matches; the footer counts what was added, removed and changed.
• Clear selection — drop the multi-select.

The selection clears once an action completes, so you can scan a long capture for the few rows that matter, ship them to a collection, and keep going.

Quit confirmation

If you quit with unsaved tabs — session tabs or Composer requests — Probe asks whether to Save All, Quit Without Saving or Cancel. Save All saves every session tab with unsaved traffic as a session named after its tab. Tick Don't ask again to keep your answer; you can change it later in Settings → General. This catches the common case of closing the laptop after a long debug session and losing the capture. On Windows it asks the same way whether you quit from File → Exit, the window's × or Alt F4.

Probe does not auto-save — if you want a tab kept, save it explicitly.

Related

• Detail panel — what saved sessions render in
• Search — runs across saved-session traffic too
• Domain Watch — only captured (watched or teaser) traffic gets saved
• Composer — replay any saved request with edits