How to get recentf-mode to work with emacs server/client

emacs

I like using recentf mode in Emacs which produces a list of files I have recently opened. This list is persistent between sessions, so I can get to files I used a fairly long time ago.

However, I recently started using Emacsclient to connect to an Emacs server which is automatically turned on when I log it. Overall, this was a big improvement. However, recentf mode started missing most of the files I opened whenever I restarted my computer. It remembers some of them, and I cannot see a pattern in which files get recorded.

How can I fix this behavior? How can I get it to record all the files I visit and remember them between sessions?

Best Answer

I was having this exact same problem, and I solved it by making two changes. First following this post, I created a function to automatically invoke recentf-save-list on a timer. Thus every few minutes, we automatically re-write the ~/.recentf file:

(run-at-time nil (* 5 60) 'recentf-save-list)

The other thing I did was to add a shutdown script to my display manager (lightdm) that gracefully closed the emacs server every time I logout or shutdown. The way you do this will depend on your display manager, but my script simply looks like

#!/bin/bash
emacsclient -e "(save-buffers-kill-emacs)"

It would also be nice to have a hook that automatically re-ran recentf-save-list every time a client "disconnected" from the server, but I couldn't figure out the proper hooks.

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C mode (and specifically the c-mode-map variable) is provided by a package called cc-mode, not c-mode.

(eval-after-load 'cc-mode
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For your other method, as vschum has already answered, you're missing the argument list in your defun. Furthermore, c-mode-common-hook isn't the right place for this: it's executed each time you enter C mode. The right time to add your binding is when C mode loads; you can do that either through the general eval-after-load mechanism as above, or through c-initialization-hook:

(defun my-c-mode-common-hook ()
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(add-hook 'c-initialization-hook 'my-c-mode-common-hook)

How to enter Erlang Mode in Emacs

Emacs doesn't come with an Erlang mode, so you need to add one. Erlang itself appears to ship with an Emacs mode that you can use; there are instructions on installing it and using it on their website, but it comes down to just adding their folders to your load path and exec path, setting a variable, and requiring the module:

(setq load-path (cons  "/usr/local/otp/lib/tools-<ToolsVer>/emacs" load-path))
(setq erlang-root-dir "/usr/local/otp")
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(require 'erlang-start)

The paths might be different depending on where you installed Erlang

Best Answer

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