Emacs Lisp screen is a tabbed window session manager modeled after GNU screen.

GNU Emacs is more of an “environment” than just an editor, since it has the strong configuration language, emacs-lisp. There are a lot of applications written in emacs-lisp, and you may run many applications on your Emacs at the same time, i.e. e-mail reader, news reader, IRC client, a kind of IDE, etc. These applications likely consist of two or more windows, so when you switch among applications, you may want to save or restore how windows are located (this is called as “window-configuration”). Note that for managing multiple buffers, you may want to use something else, like ido.

Installation

elscreen.el
Description	Emacs window session manager
Maintainer	NaotoMorishima
Source	http://www.morishima.net/~naoto/elscreen-en/?lang=en

With el-get

With el-get : M-x el-get-install RET elscreen, and done.

From sources

Download it at http://www.morishima.net/~naoto/elscreen-en/?lang=en

Basic usage

Click on the menu or type [ C-z ?] (or M-x elscreen-help) to see full help. The prefix key of elscreen is C-z.

Screen creation

[C-z C-c] (or M-x elscreen-create): create a new screen and switch to it.

[C-z C] (or M-x elscreen-clone &optional SCREEN): create a new screen with the window-configuration of SCREEN. If SCREEN is omitted, current screen is used.

Navigation

[C-z p] (or M-x elscreen-previous): switch to the previous screen. 'n' will go to next.

Suspend emacs

C-z is the prefix key, but you still can iconify emacs with C-x C-z. (see C-h w iconify-or-deiconify)

Configuration

Change prefix key

This variable must be set before elscreen is loaded :

(setq elscreen-prefix-key “\C-z”)

alternatively, you can change it when elscreen is loaded :

 (elscreen-set-prefix-key "\C-t")

Use C-prior and C-next to change tabs

Add into your ~/.emacs :

(global-set-key (kbd "<C-prior>") 'elscreen-previous)
(global-set-key (kbd "<C-next>") 'elscreen-next)

Give each screen its own buffer-list

You may want to have each screen its own independent buffer list (i.e. most recently used buffer orders). Give a try to elscreen-buffer-list. You can install it with el-get.

Persistent screens accross sessions

This is easily achievable with the elscreen-persist package on MELPA. To use it, you can either enable a mode, which will do the job automatically, either manually call a function to store and restore your current screens.

Use a hydra

Here's an example hydra to manipulate elscreens:

(defhydra hydra-elscreen (:color red :hint nil)
         "
elscreen
_c_reate    _n_ext     _s_tore
_k_ill      _p_revious _r_estore
_C_lone     _g_oto"
         ("c" elscreen-create)
         ("C" elscreen-clone)
         ("k" elscreen-kill)
         ("n" elscreen-next)
         ("p" elscreen-previous)
         ("s" elscreen-store)
         ("r" elscreen-restore)
         ("g" elscreen-goto)
         )

Elscreen

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