🗒️ Description

Auto Session takes advantage of Neovim's existing session management capabilities to provide seamless automatic session management.

💡 Behaviour

When starting nvim with no arguments, auto-session will try to restore an existing session for the current cwd if one exists.
When starting nvim . with some argument, auto-session will do nothing.
Even after starting nvim with an argument, a session can still be manually restored by running :RestoreSession.
Any session saving and restoration takes into consideration the current working directory cwd.
When piping to nvim, e.g: cat myfile | nvim, auto-session behaves like #2.

⚠️ 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 :SaveSession.

📦 Installation

Any plugin manager should do, I use Packer.nvim

use {
  'rmagatti/auto-session',
  config = function()
    require('auto-session').setup {
      log_level = 'info',
      auto_session_suppress_dirs = {'~/', '~/Projects'}
    }
  end
}

⚙️ Configuration

Default

Auto Session by default stores sessions in vim.fn.stdpath('data').."/sessions/".

Custom

One can set the auto_session root dir that will be used for auto session saving and restoring.

let g:auto_session_root_dir = path/to/my/custom/dir

" or use lua
lua << EOF
local opts = {
  log_level = 'info',
  auto_session_enable_last_session = false,
  auto_session_root_dir = vim.fn.stdpath('data').."/sessions/",
  auto_session_enabled = true,
  auto_save_enabled = nil,
  auto_restore_enabled = nil,
  auto_session_suppress_dirs = nil,
  -- the configs below are lua only
  bypass_session_save_file_types = nil
}

require('auto-session').setup(opts)
EOF

Statusline

One can show the current session name in the statusline by using an auto-session helper function.

Lualine example config and how it looks

require('lualine').setup{
  options = {
    theme = 'tokyonight',
  },
  sections = {lualine_c = {require('auto-session-library').current_session_name}}
}

Options

Config	Options	Default	Description
log_level	'debug', 'info', 'error'	'info'	Sets the log level of the plugin
auto_session_enable_last_session	false, true	false	Loads the last loaded session if session for cwd does not exist
auto_session_root_dir	"/some/path/you/want"	vim.fn.stdpath('data').."/sessions/"	Changes the root dir for sessions
auto_session_enabled	false, true	true	Enables/disables the plugin's auto save and restore features
auto_session_create_enabled	false, true	true	Enables/disables the plugin's session auto creation
auto_save_enabled	false, true, nil	nil	Enables/disables auto saving
auto_restore_enabled	false, true, nil	nil	Enables/disables auto restoring
auto_session_suppress_dirs	["list", "of paths"]	nil	Suppress session create/restore if in one of the list of dirs
auto_session_allowed_dirs	["list", "of paths"]	nil	Allow session create/restore if in one of the list of dirs

Lua Only Options

Recommended sessionoptions config

For a better experience with the plugin overall using this config for sessionoptions is recommended.

Lua

vim.o.sessionoptions="blank,buffers,curdir,folds,help,tabpages,winsize,winpos,terminal"

VimL

set sessionoptions+=winpos,terminal,folds

⚠️ if you use packer.nvim's lazy loading feature, and you have the options value in your sessionoptions beware it might lead to weird behaviour with the lazy loading, especially around key-based lazy loading where keymaps are kept and thus the lazy loading mapping packer creates never gets set again.

Last Session

This optional feature enables the keeping track and loading of the last session. This loading of a last session happens only when a RestoreSession could not find a session for the current dir. This feature can come in handy when starting Neovim from a GUI for example. :warning: This feature is still experimental and as of right now it interferes with the plugin's ability to auto create new sessions when opening Neovim in a new directory.

require('auto-session').setup {
    auto_session_enable_last_session=true,
}

⚠️ WARNING ⚠️ If the directory does not exist, default directory will be used and an error message will be printed.

📢 Commands

Auto Session exposes two commands that can be used or mapped to any keybindings for manually saving and restoring sessions.

:SaveSession " saves or creates a session in the currently set `auto_session_root_dir`.
:SaveSession ~/my/custom/path " saves or creates a session in the specified directory path.
:RestoreSession " restores a previously saved session based on the `cwd`.
:RestoreSession ~/my/custom/path " restores a previously saved session based on the provided path.
:DeleteSession " deletes a session in the currently set `auto_session_root_dir`.
:DeleteSession ~/my/custom/path " deleetes a session based on the provided path.

🪝 Command Hooks

Command hooks are a list of commands that get executed at different stages of the session management lifecycle.

Command hooks exist in the format: {hook_name}

{pre_save}: executes before a session is saved
{post_save}: executes after a session is saved
{pre_restore}: executs before a session is restored
{post_restore}: executs after a session is restored
{pre_delete}: executs before a session is deleted
{post_delete}: executs after a session is deleted

Hooks are configured by setting

let g:auto_session_{hook_name}_cmds = ["{hook_command1}", "{hook_command2}"]

" or use lua
lua << EOF
require('auto-session').setup {
    {hook_name}_cmds = {"{hook_command1}", "{hook_command2}"}
}
EOF

hook_command is a valid command mode command. e.g. to close NERDTree before saving the session.

let g:auto_session_pre_save_cmds = ["tabdo NERDTreeClose"]

Hooks can also be lua functions For example to update the directory of the session in nvim-tree:

local function restore_nvim_tree()
    local nvim_tree = require('nvim-tree')
    nvim_tree.change_dir(vim.fn.getcwd())
    nvim_tree.refresh()
end

require('auto-session').setup {
    {hook_name}_cmds = {"{vim_cmd_1}", restore_nvim_tree, "{vim_cmd_2}"}
}

Disabling the plugin

One might run into issues with Firenvim or another plugin and want to disable auto_session altogether based on some condition. For this example, as to not try and save sessions for Firenvim, we disable the plugin if the started_by_firenvim variable is set.

if exists('g:started_by_firenvim')
  let g:auto_session_enabled = v:false
endif

One can also disable the plugin by setting the auto_session_enabled option to false at startup.

nvim "+let g:auto_session_enabled = v:false"

🔭 Session Lens

Session Lens is a companion plugin to auto-session built on top of Telescope.nvim for easy switching between existing sessions.

See installation and usage instructions in the plugin's page.

Preview

Compatibility

Neovim > 0.5

Tested with:

NVIM v0.5.0-dev+a1ec36f
Build type: Release
LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3

xg-wang/auto-session