I am back from my little holiday, fully re-energized etc.; Before I went, I
asked Emacs-Fu-readers to share their favorite .emacs-tricks; and I was very
pleasantly surprise with so many excellent tricks, many of which I did not
know about. Thanks!!
So, in some future entries I´ll go through the ones I found particularly interesting – however, look for yourself through all these nice tips. Of course, I won't simply copy what you could already read, – I'm not that lazy – but instead, I'll try to give a bit of extra background, and try to make these tips even more useful.
savehist-mode
The first great new trick mentioned in the dot-emacs trickery-post was
savehist-mode (thanks Valvo).
With savehist-mode, you can save your minibuffer history (ie. the commands
you gave). It's the simple alternative to more complex session-saving
mechanisms like desktop-save-mode and (many!) friends.
save-hist-mode lets you can customize quite a few things, so my setup now
looks like this:
(setq savehist-additional-variables ;; also save... '(search-ring regexp-search-ring) ;; ... my search entries savehist-file "~/.emacs.d/savehist") ;; keep my home clean (savehist-mode t) ;; do customization before activateAs shown, you should do the customizations before enabling
savehist-mode,
or they will be ignored.
The savehist-additional-variables customization particularly interesting;
you can put any (printable) variable in the list, ie. you could put
kill-ring in there, to retrieve your old kill ring (the clipboard) when you
restart emacs again.
Note: if you want emacs to remember your recently-used files between sessions,
you can take a look at recentf.
Also, note that I am setting savehist-file to ~/.emacs.d/savehist. In
general, I'll try to put all my emacs files there, instead of in my
home-directory. This makes it a bit easier to back up things and keep my ~/
clean. For historical reasons, I still have my ~/.emacs, but I could use
~/.emacs.d/init.el instead (great tip by Steve Purcell).
4 comments:
Yes, it's useful to set a different savehist-file.. I use to have a different folder for each extension, so that I can have everything clean ;)
Great blog! ...djcb take a look at my modest blog, I decided to open it after I discovered your wonderful blog! ;) (however I'm a noob so don't pretend too much from my blog) :-P
Bye!
@valvo: i'm using my ~/.emacs.d to keep all those little files (bookmarks, backups, elpa, ....)
keep rocking with your blog :) if you have some good tip, of course i'd be happy to put it in emacs-fu too :)
Does savehist crop the size of saved histories? Or do they keep growing bigger and bigger? I can't find an option to limit history size in the customize interface.
@Jisang Yoo: I think (GNU) emacs truncates the minibuffer history automatically, so the file shouldn't grow indefinitely. There are some comments about this in savehist.el.
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