[Discuss] On rebooting, Linux, Emacs, etc.

[Kent Borg]

On 6/23/24 07:48, Dale R. Worley wrote:
> There are Emacs add-ons that keep track of […]

Emacs itself already does this reasonably well. If I have a crash I 
already lose essentially no "work", but I do lose context. I run shell 
sessions in emacs buffers, and I really like being able to search back 
through what I have done. I like not just the files I was editing to be 
opened again, but the state of my editing of them, where is the cursor?, 
what is the selection?, and is it actually selected? Do I have a 
keyboard macro defined? What man pages are open? How are things 
physically laid out? Etc. There are clean-desk bosses who poo-poo such 
concerns and I am sure there are elaborate emacs add-ons that try to 
reproduce much of that. I prefer to decide when I quit my emacs sessions.

>> That said, I kill my web browser frequently, which reverts it to the
>> same starting state each time, removing all history and cookies and
>> storred who-knows-what. I suspect most people would find their browser
>> tabs the hardest part about doing a reboot.
> I use Firefox.  Killing it does *not* remove history, cookies, or
> cache, you have to do that explicitly.

*Mine* does.

I set up Firefox the way I want it, and when I run my Firefox script 
(usually from a menu item, regular Firefox menu item is hidden) it first 
blows away Firefox's settings files, it copies in my pre-done versions, 
then starts Firefox. And when Firefox exits, it does all of that again. 
(That way just in case Firefox gets occasionally run without my script, 
the result is similar.) It is possible Firefox is saving away things in 
places I don't know about, but I suspect not.


-kb