Auto Save Files in Emacs

I’m resolving to make more frequent and regular posts on this “research” blog that’s so far has been just a place where I write down some basic tips and tricks that have to do with tools I use in programming (which is just one part of my research life). I’m not sure it’s ever going to be more than that. I take an enormous amounts of notes offline, but never quite make the effort to convert those notes into a form that I’m comfortable making public.

Anyway, to the topic of the post… auto-save functionality in Emacs. By default, Emacs auto-saves a buffer with changes in it to the same directory as the file opened in the buffer, but adds a character such as # or ~ to the beginning or end.

This auto-savin’ can be turned off with:

(setq make-backup-files nil)

But today I turned it back on, and decided, since I use SVN anyway for versioning, that I will auto-save into the same file. This is achieved with the following:

(setq auto-save-visited-file-name t)

Also, I turned up the rate at which Emacs auto-saves the files.

(setq auto-save-interval 20) ; twenty keystrokes
(setq auto-save-timeout 10) ; ten idle seconds

Some useful links:

Comments

comments

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2 Responses to Auto Save Files in Emacs

  1. hamen says:

    Thanks.
    I was using real-auto-save.el but it stopped working.

  2. zv says:

    It really good!
    Thank you so much.

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