Re: *scratch* buffer (was: A wish, a plea)

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On 22 Jun 2007, at 12:57, Jason Rumney wrote:

> David Reitter wrote:
>> I am also intending to make the *scratch* buffer persistent across
>> sessions.
>> That way, users will not be bothered to give it a name and to
>> explicitly save it. But they will retain its contents across crashes
>> and intentional restarts.
>
> That might be a good idea if there is a simple and obvious command to
> clear it when the user wants to start afresh.

I was thinking of mark-whole-buffer, then delete (whatever keys are  
bound to that). That seems obvious to me.

Giving *scratch* the right buffer-file-name and turning on auto-save- 
mode is easy enough. If the file exists, its contents are loaded at  
startup and saved upon quit without user interaction.

One could generalize that mechanism with a customization variable:

persistent-buffers:
(("*scratch*" . "~/.emacs.scratch"))

so that the user can add further persistent buffers or remove the  
*scratch* buffer to turn of persistency.

I'm not sure about how useful this would be -?