persistent org-mode clock-in history

Question

Is there a way to make the list of recently clocked-in tasks in org-mode persistent across Emacs restarts and (more importantly) closed buffers? It's annoying having to find the previous task just because I happened to exit a file.

Answer 1

I made a little package org-mru-clock to solve this.

When I run org-mru-clock-select-recent-task or org-mru-clock-in it finds all recently-clocked-in tasks from org files and stores the top org-mru-clock-how-many in org-history; that takes about 5 seconds, so it doesn't do anything if org-history already has that many entries. This is nicer than saving to disk, since I have the org files version controlled, and the initial 5 second wait is acceptable.

I use it with ivy; my init.el has this:

(use-package org-mru-clock
  :ensure t
  :defer t
  :bind* (("<f8>" . org-mru-clock-in))
  :commands (org-mru-clock-in org-mru-clock-select-recent-task)
  :config
  (setq org-mru-clock-how-many 50
        ;;;;;;;;;;;;;; Also possible: #'ido-completing-read
        org-mru-clock-completing-read #'ivy-completing-read))

The ivy interface also happens to make it really easy to switch quickly between recent tasks:

Answer 2

Org-Mode also includes this feature by default. You can set org-clock-persist to 'history to save the clock entry history when closing emacs. Or set it to t to also save the running clock when Emacs is closed. See the manual or the emacs help on org-clock-persist. For this to work you also have to run (org-clock-persistence-insinuate) in your init file.