Re: idea for new feature (was: Re: sticky-note and zle bindings)

["Christopher Lord" <christopherlord@xxxxxxxxx>]

I do something like this using gnu screen. I have 12 windows (one for
each F-key). Screen starts each shell with an environment variable
$WINDOW. It's just an integer representing each window. I have my
history set up to write to ~/.zshist/history.$WINDOW. Then each window
writes the history to it's own history file.

I currently don't persist the $PWD into a file, but I imagine it is
pretty trivial to accomplish — just write $PWD to a file
~/.zshist/curdir.$WINDOW on precmd.


On Jan 17, 2008 12:26 PM, Andy Spiegl <zsh.Andy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2008-01-16, 19:11, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> > Of course this is what share_history and inc_append_history are in
> > part intended to accomplish.
> Only for the command history, though.
> I was thinking about the directory stack.
>
> > The problem is that zsh can't do it by iself.  So, your X server has
> > crashed and 20 shell windows went kablooie.  Even if every zsh has
> > faithfully been recording its state somewhere, how does each new
> > xterm you launch on the retarted X desktop know which one of the 20
> > saved states it should restore?
> You're right - that's too complex and depends heavily on the user environment.
> But zsh could start the cooperation by providing the saved data and some kind
> of mechanism of reading it back in to restore the directory stack.
>
> Having that, it will be up to the users/terminal-guys/xserver-guys to use
> that data.  When they know that zsh provides this they might be interested
> in using it.
>
> > The upshot is that this isn't a zsh feature -- it's a cooperative
> > feature that requires effort from both the shell and whatever other
> > user interface environment it's running inside.
> Right, so let's start. :-)
>
> > It's pretty simple to dump state somewhere from the precmd() function
> In a separate file for each zsh instance?  Using the PID?  Or a counter?
> Or maybe some unique identifier for each instance, say shell1, shell2, ...
> That way zsh could check at startup whether there is a state-file for
> its name and read it back in.  The unique name should probably be in
> an environment variable.  Hm, then in .xsession you would start several
> xterms with shells like that:
>  ZSHNAME="shell-1" /usr/bin/xterm -geometry 90x45+89+212 -T "Shell-1"
>  ZSHNAME="shell-2" /usr/bin/xterm -geometry 90x45+89+212 -T "Shell-2"
>
> How about that?
>
> Bye,
>  Andy.
>
> --
>  To err is human. To really screw it up takes a computer.
>



-- 
Christopher Lord
(w) www.clawbox.com
(e) christopherlord@xxxxxxxxx
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