possession.nvim

Flexible session management for Neovim.

Features

• Save/load Vim sessions
• Keep track of last used session
• Sessions stored in JSON files
• Store arbitrary data in the session file
• User hooks before/after save/load
• Uses good old :mksession under the hood
• Configurable automatic save
• Out of the box telescope.nvim integration
• Example integration with alpha-nvim
• Save & restore nvim-dap breakpoints

Overview

This is yet another session management plugin for Neovim.

The main goal was to make session management more flexible and overall more Lua-friendly. All other session management plugins I know (e.g. auto-session, persisted.nvim, vim-obsession, vim-startify) use Vim's :mksession! directly to generate Vimscript files that are later :sourced. This works well in general, but storing user data between sessions may be problematic.

To solve this issue possession uses JSON files to easily store session metadata. Under the hood :mksession! is still used, but the resulting Vimscript is stored in the JSON file along other data.

Installation

With packer.nvim:

use {
    'jedrzejboczar/possession.nvim',
    requires = { 'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim' },
}

Or with other package managers/manually, but make sure plenary.nvim is installed.

Configuration

Detailed documentation

See doc/possession.txt.

Quick start

Call require('possession').setup { ... } somewhere in your init.lua. The default configuration is:

require('possession').setup {
    session_dir = (Path:new(vim.fn.stdpath('data')) / 'possession'):absolute(),
    silent = false,
    load_silent = true,
    debug = false,
    logfile = false,
    prompt_no_cr = false,
    autosave = {
        current = false,  -- or fun(name): boolean
        tmp = false,  -- or fun(): boolean
        tmp_name = 'tmp',
        on_load = true,
        on_quit = true,
    },
    commands = {
        save = 'PossessionSave',
        load = 'PossessionLoad',
        rename = 'PossessionRename',
        close = 'PossessionClose',
        delete = 'PossessionDelete',
        show = 'PossessionShow',
        list = 'PossessionList',
        migrate = 'PossessionMigrate',
    },
    hooks = {
        before_save = function(name) return {} end,
        after_save = function(name, user_data, aborted) end,
        before_load = function(name, user_data) return user_data end,
        after_load = function(name, user_data) end,
    },
    plugins = {
        close_windows = {
            hooks = {'before_save', 'before_load'},
            preserve_layout = true,  -- or fun(win): boolean
            match = {
                floating = true,
                buftype = {},
                filetype = {},
                custom = false,  -- or fun(win): boolean
            },
        },
        delete_hidden_buffers = {
            hooks = {
                'before_load',
                vim.o.sessionoptions:match('buffer') and 'before_save',
            },
            force = false,  -- or fun(buf): boolean
        },
        nvim_tree = true,
        tabby = true,
        dap = true,
        delete_buffers = false,
    },
    telescope = {
        list = {
            default_action = 'load',
            mappings = {
                save = { n = '<c-x>', i = '<c-x>' },
                load = { n = '<c-v>', i = '<c-v>' },
                delete = { n = '<c-t>', i = '<c-t>' },
                rename = { n = '<c-r>', i = '<c-r>' },
            },
        },
    },
}

Recommendations

Migrating

To migrate existing vimscript-based sessions use the :PossessionMigrate command. It will try to generate session files in JSON format from given directory (or file). The files will be stored in session_dir so make sure to use different directories. Session name is assumed to be the filename without extension.

Commands

The defaults command names are quite long, but shorter names can be configured:

require('possession').setup {
    commands = {
        save = 'SSave',
        load = 'SLoad',
        delete = 'SDelete',
        list = 'SList',
    }
}

Session options

Under the hood this plugin uses the command :mksession which in turn uses 'sessionoptions' to "make" the session. See :help 'sessionoptions' for available options, some notable ones:

• options - Can mess things up, use only when you know what you're doing (Neovim has sane default of not including this one)
• buffers - While this plugin offers delete_hidden_buffers, I'd also suggest using set sessionoptions-=buffers to just exclude hidden buffers when saving session.

Telescope

require('telescope').load_extension('possession')

Then use :Telescope possession list or require('telescope').extensions.possession.list() The default action will load selected session.

Auto-save

It is possible to automatically save the current session (or create a tmp session) when quitting Neovim or loading a different session. This behavior is disabled by default, but can be enabled using the autosave.* configuration options. Check doc/possession.txt for details.

Statusline

To display the current session name in statusline/winbar/etc. you can define the following function:

local function session_name()
    return require('possession.session').session_name or ''
end

and use it in your statusline setup. For a lualine example see https://github.com/jedrzejboczar/possession.nvim/issues/14#issuecomment-1272353836.

Startup screen

Currently there is no out-of-the-box integration with any startup screen, PRs welcome. For an example configuration see https://github.com/jedrzejboczar/possession.nvim/issues/22#issuecomment-1413401663. Some general guidelines are described below.

The require('possession.query') module provides helper functions for querying available sessions. It can be helpful when generating a startup screen. Take a look at the helper function workspaces_with_shortcuts which implements all the burden of splitting sessions into workspaces based on root directories specified by the user and will generate shortcuts for each group. The resulting table can be used when generating a startup screen.

When using alpha-nvim there is an additional helper function that generates a layout group that can be included in the startup screen. Example usage:

local query = require('possession.query')
local workspaces = {
    {
        'Workspace A',  -- title
        'a',            -- shortcuts prefix
        {
            '/root/directory/a',
            '/other/root/directory/',
        },
    }, {
        'Workspace B',
        'b',
        '/root/directory/b',
    }
}
-- e.g. https://github.com/goolord/alpha-nvim/blob/8a1477d8b99a931530f3cfb70f6805b759bebbf7/lua/alpha/themes/startify.lua#L28
local create_button = function(shortcut, text, keymap)
    -- ...
end

local get_layout = function()
    return query.alpha_workspace_layout(workspaces, create_button, {
        others_name = 'Sessions Without Workspace',
    })
end

-- use with the rest of sections for alpha.nvim, with throttling to avoid reading files on each redraw
local utils = require('possession.utils')
local sections = {
    -- ...
    sessions = {
        type = 'group',
        val = utils.throttle(get_layout, 5000),
    },
    -- ...
}