Autosave *scratch* to a directory

Question

When typing ls in my home directory, I amm greeted by a lot of this:

#%2Ascratch%2A#1399_po# #%2Ascratch%2A#14484YsZ# [...]

I also have the following in my init.el

(defvar autosave-location (concat user-emacs-directory "data/autosave"))

(setq auto-save-file-name-transforms
  `((".*" ,autosave-location t)))

Why, then are the scratch autosaves not being sent to ~/.emacs.d/data/autosave and instead are being blasted around my file system? Ideally, I just want it to save to that folder, however if that can't be done, disabling autosave for *scratch* buffers entirely would suffice.

I believe this started with Emacs 24.4.

Answer 1

You'll notice that you're using a variable called auto-save-file-name-transforms. Since *scratch* has no filename, it falls back to autosaving in default-directory.

For the *scratch* buffer, or any other buffers like this with no filename, you can use:

(setq-local default-directory "~/.emacs.d/data/autosave")

Edit: I see that you don't really care about autosaving scratch buffers. Can I ask how you enable auto-save-mode in your init? You should use:

 (setq-default auto-save-default t)

And not something like a hook with (auto-save-mode 1), because the variable only enables it for file-visiting buffers, while a hook could potentially enable it for buffers where you don't want it.