I have a number of variables that store useful state that would be nice to persist across restarts of Emacs. Are there any libraries that allow this to be done simply so I can avoid a bunch of boilerplate for each variable?
I've considered the customise framework but that implies putting everything in one file and it would be nice to specify a specific state file for a given set of variables so they can easily be blown away when required.
The savehist library provides one option for persisting variable values across sessions. e.g.:
(eval-after-load "savehist"
'(add-to-list 'savehist-additional-variables 'foo))
(savehist-mode 1)
As with customize, that's writing everything to a single specific file. But there's no reason why you couldn't leverage this library's functionality by let-binding the relevant vars to save and load specific sets of values.
Load library Bookmark+ and use a variable-list bookmark.
A variable-list bookmark saves and restores the values of a set of variables.
Command bmkp-set-variable-list-bookmark
prompts you for the variables to include in the list and then sets the bookmark. Non-interactively, you can use function bmkp-create-variable-list-bookmark to create or update a variable-list bookmark.
Command bmkp-jump-variable-list (C-x j v) restores the recorded variable values for the bookmark's buffer. You can call also this function non-interactively, of course, including from your init file.
(bmkp-jump-variable-list BOOKMARK) ; BOOKMARK is a bookmark name or a bookmark
