persistent-scratch is an Emacs package that preserves the state of scratch
buffers accross Emacs sessions by saving the state to and restoring it from a
file.
The package is available in MELPA and MELPA Stable.
If you have MELPA or MELPA Stable in package-archives, use
M-x package-install RET persistent-scratch RET
If you don't, open persistent-scratch.el in Emacs and call
package-install-from-buffer.
Other installation methods are unsupported.
To save the current state of scratch buffers to file indicated by
persistent-scratch-save-file:
M-x persistent-scratch-save
To restore scratch buffers from persistent-scratch-save-file:
M-x persistent-scratch-restore
To save the state to an arbitrary file:
M-x persistent-scratch-save-to-file
To restore the state from an arbitrary file:
M-x persistent-scratch-restore-from-file
To toggle periodic autosave:
M-x persistent-scratch-autosave-mode
To create a new backup file (only when backup is enabled, see
persistent-scratch-backup-directory), so that the next
persistent-scratch-save won't overwrite the existing backup:
M-x persistent-scratch-new-backup
To customize the save file path, what state to save, the autosave period, what buffers are considered scratch buffers and whether to backup old saved states:
M-x customize-group RET persistent-scratch RET
Variables can be customized either via customize or by setting them via setq
directly.
To both enable autosave and restore the last saved state, if any, on Emacs start, add
(persistent-scratch-setup-default)to the init file. This will not error when the save file doesn't exist.
To just enable autosave, enable persistent-scratch-autosave-mode like any
other minor mode:
(persistent-scratch-autosave-mode 1)To just restore the last saved file, use persistent-scratch-restore. Bear in
mind it may signal an error if there's no save file, so it's a good idea to call
it inside ignore-errors or with-demoted-errors.