See also: Activities.el, which provides more advanced functionality. To some extent, it obsoletes this library.

This package provides tools to save and restore frame and window configurations in Emacs, including buffers that may not be live anymore. In this way, it’s like a lightweight “workspace” manager, allowing you to easily restore one or more frames, including their windows, the windows’ layout, and their buffers.

Internally it uses Emacs’s bookmarks system to restore buffers to their previous contents and location. This provides power and extensibility, since many major modes already integrate with Emacs’s bookmarks system. However, in case a mode’s bookmarking function isn’t satisfactory, Burly allows the user to customize buffer-restoring functions for specific modes.

For Org mode, Burly provides such custom functions so that narrowed and indirect Org buffers are properly restored, and headings are located by outline path in case they’ve moved since a bookmark was made (the org-bookmark-heading package also provides this through the Emacs bookmark system, but users may not have it installed, and the functionality is too useful to not include here by default).

Internally, buffers and frame/window configurations are also encoded as URLs, and users may also save and open those URLs instead of using Emacs bookmarks. (The name “Burly” comes from “buffer URL.”) For example, a URL to the Installation/Quelpa heading in this file, as I’m writing it, looks like this:

emacs+burly+file:///home/me/src/emacs/burly.el/README.org?pos=2651&outline-path=%28%22Installation%22%20%22Quelpa%22%29&relative-pos=308

In terms of built-in features, Burly may be seen as integrating or leveraging the built-in libraries bookmark.el, window.el, and frameset.el.

• Installation
• Usage
• Changelog
• Development
• Credits
• License

If you installed from MELPA, you’re done. Just run one of the commands below.

The easiest way is to install with quelpa-use-package, like this:

(use-package burly
  :quelpa (burly :fetcher github :repo "alphapapa/burly.el"))

1. Install version 2.1 or later of the map library from GNU ELPA.
2. Copy burly.el into a directory in your load-path, then (require 'burly).

Most users will probably use Burly by bookmarking frame and window configurations and accessing them with these commands:

• burly-bookmark-frames: Bookmark the current frames and their window configurations.
• burly-bookmark-windows: Bookmark the current frame’s window configuration.
• burly-open-bookmark: Select and open a Burly bookmark.
• burly-open-last-bookmark: Open the last-opened Burly bookmark. Helpful for, e.g. quickly restoring an overview while working on a project.

Note that bookmarks created by Burly are regular Emacs bookmarks, so they can be managed by Emacs’s built-in bookmark commands, e.g. list-bookmarks, bookmark-delete, etc.

These commands work on URL strings. While most users probably won’t use these, they may be useful for building custom tooling.

• burly-open-url: Open a Burly URL (at point, or prompt for one), displaying the buffer(s) in the current window or frame.
• burly-kill-buffer-url: Copy BUFFER’s URL to the kill ring.
• burly-kill-frames-url: Copy the current frameset’s URL to the kill ring.
• burly-kill-windows-url: Copy the current frame’s window configuration URL to the kill ring.

Burly supports Emacs’s tab-bar-mode with burly-tabs-mode. When active, Burly bookmarks are opened in new tabs, and the tabs are named according to the bookmarks. Reopening a Burly bookmark uses the designated tab, if it already exists, and tabs may be reset to their bookmarked state with the command burly-reset-tab (which you might bind to C-x t R).

• You can customize settings in the burly group.
• An Info manual is included with this package.

Added

• Option burly-tabs-after-hook, run after opening a Burly bookmark in burly-tabs-mode. (Useful for, e.g. integrating with Bufler to set the new tab’s workspace automatically.)
• Option burly-tabs-abbreviate-name abbreviates the names of Burly bookmarks when using burly-tabs-mode.

Fixed

• Preservation of window parameter window-preserved-size.

Added

• Command burly-tabs-mode, which integrates Burly with tab-bar-mode. When active, Burly bookmarks are opened in new tabs, and the tabs are named according to the bookmark.
• Command burly-reset-tab, which resets a tab to the state of the bookmark which opened it.

Changed

• Emacs version 28.1 or later is required.

Fixed

• Buffers that can’t be restored by name no longer cause an error which aborts restoration of the rest of the bookmark’s buffers.
• Added workaround for regression in Emacs 28 regarding bookmarks for help-mode buffers. (See Emacs bug 56643.)
• Removed unadvisable local rebinding of alist-get in function burly-follow-url-org-mode. An innocent change in Org 9.6 was broken by this, which then broke this when called through Burly. (With thanks to Ihor Radchenko for debugging.)
• Load default bookmarks file when needed. (#46. Thanks to Billy Zheng and ParetoOptimalDev for reporting, and to Thomas Freeman for fixing.)

Added

• Bookmark commands use completing-read and offer existing Burly bookmark names, making it easier to update bookmarks. (Thanks to Erik Sjöstrand.)
• Command burly-open-last-bookmark.
• Option burly-set-window-persistent-parameters, which synchronizes window-persistent-parameters with burly-window-persistent-parameters, ensuring that built-in Emacs commands like window-toggle-side-windows persist parameters that are persisted with Burly.

Changed

• Option burly-window-persistent-parameters’s default value includes more window parameters, like header/mode line, side, slot, etc, making it easier to restore an overview of a project or “workspace.”
• Emacs version 27.1 or later is required.

Fixed

• Narrow Org buffers to correct heading (at the top of the buffer rather than at point).
• Buffers whose names have multibyte characters. (Fixes #43. Thanks to Liu Hui for reporting.)
• Bind print-level to nil where prin1-to-string is used (in case the value is non-nil in a user’s config, which would cause truncated values).

Initial release.

Bug reports, feature requests, suggestions — oh my!

• Thanks to Clemens Radermacher and Robert Weiner for their suggestions.
• Thanks to Trey Peacock for extensive feedback on pre-release versions.

GPLv3