Re: Window configurations

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>>> There is one problem of using bookmark records for desktop.el.
>>> Some bookmarks take too much time to restore when reading
>>> from the desktop file.
>
> Juri, do you have more details on this?  I don't know of this problem.

Currently, Info mode doesn't save/restore virtual Info nodes to the
desktop file at all.  Even `dir' is not saved (which is a virtual file now).

The patch I sent on 2010-04-27 allows Info-desktop-buffer-misc-data
to save all virtual nodes to the desktop, except Info-apropos.
Info-apropos takes too much time to create a node with the search results.
So restoring an Info-apropos node from the desktop file would be
unacceptably slow.

One variant is to save the apropos search results as text in the desktop file,
but then it will grow too big.

There is no such problem for bookmarks because when the user decides
to restore a bookmark for an Info-apropos node, then the user is ready
to wait until this Info node is created and displayed.

> Noone's trying to unify the two: desktop.el uses internally
> a representation of "the content and position of a given buffer" to be
> able to reproduce it later, and as it turns out, this is the exact same
> problem that bookmark tries to solve.  So it might make sense for
> desktop.el to use bookmarks for that internal thingy.
>
> I'm not 100% positive it does since the purpose is slightly different
> (e.g. a bookmark is expected to be useful for a potentially long period
> of time during which the file referenced might be modified many times,
> so bookmark doesn't just record the buffer position but also some
> context so as to find the same spot even if it's not at the same line
> number any more.  It's probably less important for desktop.el).

There is another package that could benefit from the functionality of
bookmark.el - saveplace.el that saves places in files.  For instance,
when I put point on the `* Elisp: (elisp)' line in `dir', kill the
*info* buffer, and type `C-h i' again, then I'd like if point was
on the same `* Elisp: (elisp)' line.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/