Packages Related to Session
There are session management packages of two different categories, that are determined by one question:
Do you want to revisit all files from your last session and restore their places if you start Emacs or do you want that Emacs keeps track of the recently visited/changed files and restores as much places and other information for the corresponding buffer as possible if you revisit that file?
Package Session belongs to the second category. I actually don't like to have a huge startup time, simply because Emacs reads a lot of files at startup which I'm not interested in at the moment. I just want to be able to easily revisit files I've used before with point being at the position where it was the last time, and I want to be able to jump to the position of the last change.
One could imaging a combination of both categories, but nobody has actually done it. If you want, you could use package Session together with a package of the other category, probably desktop.el. Some packages of both categories also save some global variables (Session does).
Here is a little list of related packages, collected around 1998, some discarded later (no URLs, no active updating, but you can send me a mail). Let's start with the first category:
- Package desktop.el restores buffers of many types at startup, restores their places and also some global variables. There is package desktop-phase.el which provides a "forgetting service" for desktop.
- Package revive.el is similar to desktop and included in the distribution for windows.el, a package to restore frame/window configurations.
- Package saveconf.el saves the buffers with the position of point and the window configuration.
- Package tinydesk.el just restores files at startup without any places.
Here is a list of packages in the second category, i.e., the same category as package Session:
- Package saveplace.el just restores point if you revisit a buffer. No global variables are saved.
- Package recent-files.el maintains a menu of recently opened files with the possibility to mark files as permanent. But no places will be restored. It does not save global variables.
- Packages which only save same global variables also exist: savehist.el saves the values of variables in some list, tinyhist.el just saves the command history.
There are also some packages which restore window configurations. These could also be considered related to session management packages, probably more so for packages of the first category.