CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacsproject
user1031565
user1031565

Reputation: 107

Project switching in emacs

I would like to associate sets of buffers/files in emacs with different projects, and switch from one to other. This would involve closing all the buffers associated with the present project and open the files corresponding to the switched-to-project. I tried setting up desktops using bookmarks+ as suggested in https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/315/using-desktop-for-basic-project-management but all buffers remain open. I also tried setting up workgroups using workgroups2 (https://github.com/pashinin/workgroups2), but had similar issues. Is there an existing emacs package that could be used for this?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2163

Answers (3)

Drew
Drew

Reputation: 30699

You say, "I tried setting up desktops using bookmarks+ as suggested in using-desktop-for-basic-project-management but all buffers remain open.".

I guess you mean that switching to a desktop does not kill buffers that existed before the switch. Not by itself, it doesn't. How can it guess which such pre-existing buffers you want killed?

Clearly you do not want to kill all buffers that existed prior to the desktop switch.

To get the behavior it seems you want, you would need to somehow decide, and specify, which such buffers you would like killed. You could, for example, choose to kill all that have a certain mode (perhaps using desktop-buffer-mode-handlers).

With Bookmark+ you can have bookmarks that do more than one thing. In particular, here, you could create a sequence bookmark that chains together (1) a function bookmark that kills all of the buffers you want to kill and (2) a desktop bookmark.

Or you can perhaps make use of desktop-after-read-hook or desktop-buffer-mode-handlers to do some cleanup.

(But it sounds like you have not really thought through exactly what behavior you want with respect to buffers that you do not want to "remain open", so that you can specify it clearly. If you can specify it then you can probably implement it fairly easily, using either desktop hooks or bookmarks or both. Just a guess.)

Upvotes: 2

kjhughes
kjhughes

Reputation: 111601

Alternative suggestion

I recommend that you don't look to emacs to manage buffers, frames, and editor state separately across projects.

Instead, use a desktop manager and create separate desktops for each project. This works well because not only can you have separate emacs instances (that you can be sure are truly separated), but you can also have separate web browsers open to documentation or other project-specific applications that collectively get swapped in and out when you switch between projects.

Upvotes: 2

Symfrog
Symfrog

Reputation: 3418

There is an excellent package called Projectile that does exactly what you describe and more.

Upvotes: 4

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