Recover unsaved documents and reopen the previous session after a crash

[slaygon]

Currently, if xed is killed by a crash or power loss, any unsaved work, including never-saved (Ctrl-N) buffers, is lost, and open tabs aren't restored on the next launch. I'd like xed to periodically keep a recovery copy of unsaved buffers and reopen the previously-open documents on startup (browser-style), behind a preference. Is this something of interest? I have a working implementation behind a restore-session setting and can open a PR.

[slaygon]

I have a working implementation on my fork, on the branch autosave-session-restore (single commit, builds with meson/ninja).

It does crash recovery of unsaved/untitled buffers (snapshotted to ~/.local/share/xed/recovery/) and reopens the previous session on launch. Off by default, opt-in via Preferences > Save. This also covers the requests in #607, #428, #720, #226 and #600.

Unlike the existing session-saver plugin (tudo75/xed-restore-tabs-plugin), which reopens previously saved files by path, this also restores the contents of never-saved buffers, which is the crash-recovery half asked for in #607 and #428.

Give it a go and let me know if it suits your needs:

git clone -b autosave-session-restore https://github.com/slaygon/xed.git
cd xed
meson setup build
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

(Quit any running xed first, since the old instance owns the org.x.editor D-Bus name.)