Re: session management with desktop and window configuration

[Kiwon Um <um.kiwon@gmail.com>]

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. :)