Re: session management with desktop and window configuration

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Kiwon Um <um.kiwon@gmail.com> wrote:
> martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at> writes:
>
>>> I'm now using desktop.el for managing sessions. When I do desktop-
>>> read, it restore all files opened before well. Then, I'm wondering if
>>> there is any way to restore window configuration as well in easy way.
>>> Firstly, I tried to add some functions to the desktop hooks as
>>> follows:
>>>   (add-hook 'desktop-save-hook '(window-configuration-to-register ?0))
>>>   (add-hook 'desktop-after-read-hook '(jump-to-register ?0))
>>> However, it didn't work at all.
>>>
>>> The register-base window configuration save/restore are perfect to
>>> what I want. But I don't know how to integrate it with desktop. Please
>>> give me help.
>>
>> You can't do this with desktop at the moment.  The basic problem is that
>> we currently cannot read window configurations from a file - a window
>> configuration can only be saved in memory and retrieved from there.
>> This obviously means that when you exit Emacs your saved window
>> configurations are lost forever.  In this context note also that you
>> can't cleanly restore a window configuration in one and the same session
>> if you have deleted its frame in the meantime.
>>
>> Basically you should be able to write a configuration to a file as a
>> sequence of `split-window' functions (and some interspersed window
>> resizings) and execute these commands when you restart Emacs.  But you
>> might end up getting only an approximation of the earlier configuration
>> partly due to the quite unpredictable behavior of the current window
>> resizing code which can, for example, deliberately delete windows when
>> they become too small.
>>
>> I'm currently contemplating functions that write window configurations
>> to a file and read them from there.  This way I can circumvent the
>> window splitting mechanism and directly construct a window-tree from the
>> information on the file.  This should solve the problem for you.
>>
>> Meanwhile you could try out ECB which does something similar to what you
>> want.
>>
>> martin
>
> Thanks for your reply. So, I wrote some functions using revive.el:
>
> (require 'revive)
> (defun kiwon/save-window-configuration ()
>  (write-region (concat "(restore-window-configuration '"
>                        (prin1-to-string (current-window-configuration-printable))
>                        ")")
>                nil ".emacs.restore-window.el"))
> (defun kiwon/restore-window-configuration ()
>  (when (file-exists-p ".emacs.restore-window.el")
>    (load-file ".emacs.restore-window.el")))
>
> (add-hook 'desktop-save-hook 'kiwon/save-window-configuration)
> (add-hook 'desktop-after-read-hook 'kiwon/restore-window-configuration)
>
> It seems to be enough to what I wanted. :)


Nice. I have seen revive but have not looked into it. There is also
winsav.el in nXhtml that can save and restore frames and windows.
(Martin, I am a bit surprised that you do not know about it. Didn't I
tell about this before?)