dogears.el

Never lose your place in Emacs again!

This library automatically and smartly remembers where you’ve been, in and across buffers, and helps you quickly return to any of those places. It works similarly to a Web browser’s history list and back/forward commands, but with more contextual information and customization. As well, for most modes, it can return to a place even if its buffer no longer exists.

It’s configurable to suit each user, with regard to how often places are remembered, which ones, and for how long. It uses standard Emacs completion, so it works with Helm, Ivy, Selectrum, Vertico, etc. For Helm users, a helm-dogears-source is also provided in helm-dogears.el that can be used with any Helm command.

Screenshots

This shows the dogears-list buffer, in which you can browse entries, sort them, etc.

This screenshot shows it while using the theme doom-solarized-dark, and the Line column shows some source code snippets with highlighting by prism.el.

Contents

Installation

MELPA

This library isn’t yet on MELPA.

Quelpa

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

;; Install and load `quelpa-use-package'.
(package-install 'quelpa-use-package)
(require 'quelpa-use-package)

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

  ;; These bindings are optional, of course:
  :bind (:map global-map
              ("M-g d" . dogears-go)
              ("M-g M-b" . dogears-back)
              ("M-g M-f" . dogears-forward)
              ("M-g M-d" . dogears-list)
              ("M-g M-D" . dogears-sidebar)))

Manual

If you want to install it manually, it’s simple enough, but you should know what you’re doing, and you’re on your own.

Usage

It works by automatically remembering (“dogearing”) the place at point when any of three things happens:

• The dogears idle timer runs (after 5 seconds idle, by default).
• One of the dogears-hooks is run (only including imenu-after-jump-hook by default).
• One of the functions listed in dogears-functions is called (none, by default).

Then the user can run a command to view or go to places in the list.

• You can customize settings in the dogears group.

Changelog

0.1-pre

Not yet tagged.

Development

Bug reports, feature requests, suggestions — oh my!

Implementation

Internally, Dogears uses the built-in Emacs bookmark library to make bookmark-like records, however they are stored in dogears-list rather than bookmark-alist, so they are not accessible with bookmark commands. Nor is the dogears-list persisted to a file; it is empty when Emacs starts. If the bookmark-make-record-function does not return a record for a place, Dogears uses a simple fallback that saves a record referring to the buffer by name, which allows it to remember places in, e.g. the *scratch* buffer. When returning to a place, Dogears uses bookmark-jump, which for many, if not most, modes returns not only to the buffer or file but to the specific location in it. And by using bookmark internally, Dogears benefits from packages that extend it, like org-bookmark-heading.

Dogears also uses other built-in Emacs libraries, such as which-function and imenu, to provide information about the context surrounding a place, such as a function or variable definition, an outline heading, etc.

Alternatives

Some other, similar packages:

License

GPLv3