eyebrowse-restore

Never lose your Eyebrowse window configurations again.

Installation

The package is in MELPA

(use-package eyebrowse-restore
  :ensure t
  :config
  (eyebrowse-restore-mode))

Or install it from upstream using Quelpa (or your preferred package manager)

(use-package eyebrowse-restore
  :ensure t
  :quelpa (eyebrowse-restore
           :fetcher github
           :repo "FrostyX/eyebrowse-restore"
           :branch "main")
  :config
  (eyebrowse-restore-mode))

Usage

All Eyebrowse window configurations for all Emacs frames are automatically saved with a periodicity of eyebrowse-restore-save-interval. If you want to invoke this action manually, run M-x eyebrowse-restore-save-all.

Apart from that, when closing an Emacs frame, its Eyebrowse window configurations are saved beforehand.

After an Emacs crash, god forbid, simply run M-x eyebrowse-restore to use Eyebrowse workspace from a backup of your choice.

For a better experience, I recommend naming your Emacs frames, e.g.

(set-frame-parameter nil 'name "Main")

Configuration

Multiple Emacs instances

There is no locking mechanism that would prevent multiple Emacs instances from overriding each other’s backups. Either enable eyebrowse-restore-mode only for one instance or configure eyebrowse-restore-dir to a different directory for each instance.

Background

Eyebrowse separates window configurations per Emacs frame (in opposite to Emacs instance). This is intended behavior and it is rooted in the implementation details. In a daemon setup, window configurations are assigned to an emacsclient frame instead of the daemon instance, i.e. closing an emacsclient destroys all of its Eyebrowse window configurations.

Making window configurations shared across all Emacs frames is a controversial topic because the use-case is nonsensical for the majority of users.

The main issue for me is not the absence of sharing window configurations across all frames but recovering from reboots, window manager crashes, Emacs crashes, or anything else that results in having to spawn a new Emacs instance from scratch.

Thanks to the desktop.el, Eyebrowse supports persistent window configurations with one caveat - it is reliable only for single-frame use. When using multiple Emacs frames, it depends in what order the frames are closed, and only the last one is remembered.

The eyebrowse-restore prevents you from losing the window configurations for the rest of the frames.