save-cwd: save your current working directory to a file

About

How many times have you had to type in a long path in a shell to get to the directory you were just editing a file while inside emacs?

Usage in emacs

(require 'save-cwd)
(setq save-cwd-location "~/.emacs_cwd") ;; the default
(setq save-cwd-timer-period 5)  ;; can be 1 and still be efficient, FYI
(save-cwd) ;; turns on the save-cwd minor mode

Usage in your shell:

# cd `cat ~/.emacs_cwd`

or put it in an alias:

# cde() {  cd `cat ~/.emacs_cwd` ; echo "changed to `cat ~/.emacs_cwd`" ; }

Caveats

Will do funky things if invoked in two different emacs processes. (But why would you use two in the first place???)

Other options

M-x shell: Sure, you can do M-x shell and get a new shell there, but that's simply inefficient when you have a bazillion shells, one per directory.

emacsclient: Three is probably a way to pass a command to emacsclient -e, but I didn't go that route. Would probably work fine too though.

Bind to key: I'll eventually add (interactive) to the function to optionally "save now" rather than via a timer. But that would require moving the mouse back to emacs when you forget to run it before switching to a terminal window.

What I'll take flack for

Leaving emacs in the first place.

With Thanks To ...

Thanks a bunch to the following people that help contribute code and/or ideas to this project:

• Samuel W. Flint swflint@flintfam.org