Vim Sessions

Tip 23. Saving and Restoring Sessions

Sometimes you have to restart Vim. Usually this means losing your list of open buffers, as well as any open tab pages or windows. Fortunately, Vim’s session management allows you to save your current workspace so that you can restore it again later.

Saving and Loading Sessions Manually

• :mksession!
• vim -S
• :source Session.vim
• :mksession! mysession.vim
• vim -S mysession.vim
• :source mysession.vim

Vim sessions 101 for beginners.

Saving Sessions Automatically

If you like the idea of having your session recorded automatically when using Neovim, you should try installing the auto-session plugin.

Create a auto-session.lua file in your plugin config folder:

return {
	"rmagatti/auto-session",
	config = function()
		local auto_session = require("auto-session")

		auto_session.setup({
			auto_restore = false,
			suppress_dirs = { "~/", "~/Dev/", "~/Downloads", "~/Documents", "~/Desktop/" },
		})

		local keymap = vim.keymap

		keymap.set("n", "<leader>wr", "<cmd>SessionRestore<CR>", { desc = "Restore session for cwd" }) -- restore last workspace session for current directory
		keymap.set("n", "<leader>ws", "<cmd>SessionSave<CR>", { desc = "Save session for auto session root dir" }) -- save workspace session for current working directory
		keymap.set("n", "<leader>wa", "<cmd>SessionToggleAutoSave<CR>", { desc = "Toggle autosave" })
	end,
}

After installation, your Neovim should have the following behaviors:

• When starting nvim with no arguments, AutoSession will try to restore an existing session for the current cwd if one exists
• When starting nvim . (or another directory), AutoSession will not restore the session for that directory
• When starting nvim some_file.txt (or multiple files), by default, AutoSession won't do anything
• Even after starting nvim with a file argument, a session can still be manually restored by running :SessionRestore
• Any session saving and restoration takes into consideration the current working directory cwd
• When piping to nvim, e.g: cat myfile | nvim, AutoSession won't do anything

That's to say, use nvim to get back to where you left off, and use nvim . to start anew with nvim-tree explorer.

WARNING

Please note that if there are errors in your config, restoring the session might fail, if that happens, auto session will then disable auto saving for the current session. Manually saving a session can still be done by calling :SessionSave.

All session files are saved at nvim-data/sessions/.